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62198

QUEST OF THIG By BASIL WELLS Thig of Ortha was the vanguard of the conquering "HORDE." He had blasted across trackless space to subdue a defenseless world—only to meet on Earth emotions that were more deadly than weapons. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Thig carefully smoothed the dark sand and seaweed of the lonely beach over the metal lid of the flexible ringed tunnel that linked the grubby ship from another planet with the upper air. He looked out across the heaving waters of the Sound toward Connecticut. He stared appraisingly around at the luxuriant green growth of foliage further inland; and started toward the little stretch of trees and brush, walking carefully because of the lesser gravitation. Thig was shorter than the average Earthman—although on Ortha he was well above the average in height—but his body was thick and powerfully muscled. His skull was well-shaped and large; his features were regular, perhaps a trifle oversize, and his hair and eyes were a curiously matching blend of reddish brown. Oddest of all, he wore no garments, other than the necessary belt and straps to support his rod-like weapon of white metal and his pouches for food and specimens. The Orthan entered the narrow strip of trees and crossed to the little-used highway on the other side. Here he patiently sat down to wait for an Earthman or an Earthwoman to pass. His task now was to bring a native, intact if possible, back to the carefully buried space cruiser where his two fellows and himself would drain the creature's mentality of all its knowledge. In this way they could learn whether a planet was suited for colonization by later swarms of Orthans. Already they had charted over a hundred celestial bodies but of them all only three had proven worthy of consideration. This latest planet, however, 72-P-3 on the chart, appeared to be an ideal world in every respect. Sunlight, plenty of water and a dense atmospheric envelope made of 72-P-3 a paradise among planets. The explorer from another world crouched into the concealment of a leafy shrub. A creature was approaching. Its squat body was covered with baggy strips of bluish cloth and it carried a jointed rod of metal and wood in its paw. It walked upright as did the men of Ortha. Thig's cold eyes opened a trifle wider as he stared into the thing's stupid face. It was as though he was looking into a bit of polished metal at the reflection of himself! The Earthman was opposite now and he must waste no more precious time. The mighty muscles of the Orthan sent him hurtling across the intervening space in two prodigious bounds, and his hands clamped across the mouth and neck of the stranger.... Lewis Terry was going fishing. For a week the typewriter mill that had ground out a thousand assorted yarns of the untamed West and the frigid desolation of the Northwoods had been silent. Lewis wondered if he was going stale. He had sat every day for eight hours in front of that shiny-buttoned bane of the typist, but there were no results. Feebly he had punched a key two days ago and a $ sign had appeared. He hadn't dared touch the machine since. For Mr. Terry, that hard-hitting writer of two-gun action, had never been further west of Long Island than Elizabeth, and he had promised his wife, Ellen, that he would take the three children and herself on a trailer tour of the West that very summer. Since that promise, he could not write a word. Visions of whooping red-skinned Apaches and be-chapped outlaws raiding his little trailer home kept rolling up out of his subconscious. Yet he had to write at least three novelets and a fistful of short stories in the next two weeks to finance the great adventure—or the trip was off. So Lewis left the weathered old cottage in the early dawn and headed for his tubby old boat at the landing in an attempt to work out a salable yarn.... "Hey!" he shouted as a naked man sprang out of the bushes beside the road. "What's the trouble?" Then he had no time for further speech, the massive arms of the stranger had wound around him and two hamlike hands shut off his speech and his wind. He fought futilely against trained muscles. The hand clamping his throat relaxed for a moment and hacked along the side of his head. Blackness flooded the brain of Lewis, and he knew no more. "There it is," announced Thig, dropping the limp body of the captured Earthman to the metal deck-plates. "It is a male of the species that must have built the cities we saw as we landed." "He resembles Thig," announced Kam. "But for the strange covering he wears he might be Thig." "Thig will be this creature!" announced Torp. "With a psychic relay we will transfer the Earthman's memories and meager store of knowledge to the brain of Thig! He can then go out and scout this world without arousing suspicion. While he is gone, I will take Kam and explore the two inner planets." "You are the commander," said Thig. "But I wish this beast did not wear these clumsy sheathing upon his body. On Ortha we do not hamper the use of our limbs so." "Do not question the word of your commander," growled Torp, swelling out his thick chest menacingly. "It is for the good of our people that you disguise yourself as an Earthman." "For the good of the Horde," Thig intoned almost piously as he lifted Terry's body and headed for the laboratory. Service for the Horde was all that the men of Ortha knew. Carefully cultured and brought to life in the laboratories of their Horde, they knew neither father nor mother. Affection and love were entirely lacking in their early training and later life. They were trained antlike from childhood that only the growth and power of the Horde were of any moment. Men and women alike toiled and died like unfeeling robots of flesh and bone for the Horde. The Horde was their religion, their love-life, their everything! So it was that the bodies of the Earthman and the Orthan were strapped on two parallel tables of chill metal and the twin helmets, linked to one another by the intricacies of the psychic relay, put upon their heads. For ten hours or more the droning hum of the relay sucked Terry's brain dry of knowledge. The shock upon the nervous system of the Earthman proved too violent and his heart faltered after a time and stopped completely. Twice, with subtle drugs they restored pseudo-life to his body and kept the electrical impulses throbbing from his tortured brain, but after the third suspension of life Thig removed his helmet. "There is nothing more to learn," he informed his impassive comrades. "Now, let us get on with the plastic surgery that is required. My new body must return to its barbaric household before undue attention is aroused. And when I return I will take along some of the gleaming baubles we found on the red planet—these people value them highly." An hour later, his scars and altered cartilage already healed and painless, Thig again scraped sand over the entrance to the space ship and set out along the moonlit beach toward the nearest path running inland to his home. Memory was laying the country bare about him, Terry's own childhood memories of this particular section of Long Island. Here was the place where Jake and Ted had helped him dig for the buried treasure that old 'Notch-ear' Beggs had told them so exactly about. Remembrance of that episode gave Thig an idea about the little lump of jewels in his pocket. He had found them in a chest along the beach! He was coming up on the porch now and at the sound of his foot on the sagging boards the screen door burst open and three little Earth-creatures were hugging at his legs. An odd sensation, that his acquired memories labeled as pleasure, sent a warm glow upward from around his heart. Then he saw the slender red-haired shape of a woman, the mate of the dead man he knew, and confusion struck his well-trained brain. Men had no mates on Ortha, sex had been overthrown with all the other primitive impulses of barbarism; so he was incapable of understanding the emotions that swept through his acquired memory. Unsteadily he took her in his arms and felt her warm lips pressed, trembling, against his own. That same hot wave of pulsing blood choked achingly up into his throat. "Lew, dear," Ellen was asking, "where have you been all day? I called up at the landing but you were not there. I wanted to let you know that Saddlebag Publications sent a check for $50 for "Reversed Revolvers" and three other editors asked for shorts soon." "Shoulda got a hundred bucks for that yarn," grunted Thig, and gasped. For the moment he had been Lewis Terry and not Thig! So thoroughly had he acquired the knowledge of Terry that he found himself unconsciously adopting the thinking and mannerism of the other. All the better this way, he realized—more natural. "Sorry I was late," he said, digging into his pocket for the glittering baubles, "but I was poking around on the beach where we used to hunt treasure and I found an old chest. Inside it I found nothing but a handful of these." He flashed the jewels in front of Ellen's startled eyes and she clung, unbelieving, to his arm. "Why, Lew," she gasped, "they're worth a fortune! We can buy that new trailer now and have a rebuilt motor in the car. We can go west right away.... Hollywood, the Grand Canyon, cowboys!" "Uh huh," agreed the pseudo Lewis, memories of the ferocious savages and gunmen of his stories rendering him acutely unhappy. Sincerely he hoped that the west had reformed. "I saved some kraut and weiners," Ellen said. "Get washed up while I'm warming them up. Kids ate all the bread so I had to borrow some from the Eskoes. Want coffee, too?" "Mmmmmm," came from the depths of the chipped white wash-basin. "Home again," whispered Ellen as she stood beside Thig twelve weeks later and gazed tearfully at the weathered little gray house. She knelt beside the front stoop and reached for the key hidden beneath it. "The west was wonderful; tremendous, vast and beautiful," she went on as they climbed the steps, "but nowhere was there any place as beautiful as our own little strip of sky and water." Thig sank into a dusty old swing that hung on creaking chains from the exposed rafters of the porch roof. He looked down at the dusty gray car and the bulbous silvery bulk of the trailer that had been their living quarters for almost three months. Strange thoughts were afloat in the chaos of his cool Orthan brain. Tonight or tomorrow night at the latest he must contact his two fellows and report that Earth was a planetary paradise. No other world, including Ortha, was so well-favored and rich. An expeditionary force to wipe the grotesque civilizations of Earth out of existence would, of course, be necessary before the first units of new Hordes could be landed. And there Thig balked. Why must they destroy these people, imperfect though their civilization might be, to make room for the Hordes? Thig tried to tell himself that it was the transmitted thoughts of the dead Earthman that made him feel so, but he was not too sure. For three months he had lived with people who loved, hated, wept and sacrificed for reasons that he had never known existed. He had learned the heady glory of thinking for himself and making his own decisions. He had experienced the primitive joy of matching his wits and tongue against the wits of other unpredictable human beings. There was no abrupt division of men and women into definite classes of endeavor. A laborer thought the same thoughts that a governor might think. Uncertainty added zest to every day's life. The Orthan had come to question the sole devotion of the individual to the Horde to the exclusion of all other interests. What, he wondered, would one new world—or a hundred—populated by the Hordes add to the progress of humanity? For a hundred thousand years the Orthan civilization had remained static, its energies directed into certain well-defined channels. They were mindless bees maintaining their vast mechanical hives. There was that moment on the brink of the Grand Canyon when Ellen had caught his arm breathlessly at all the beauty spread away there beneath them. There were mornings in the desert when the sun painted in lurid red the peaks above the harsh black-and-whites of the sagebrush and cactus slopes. There was the little boy, his body burning with fever, who nestled trustingly against his tense man's body and slept—the son of Ellen and the man he had destroyed. Thig groaned. He was a weakling to let sentimentality so get the better of his judgment. He would go now to the space ship and urge them to blast off for Ortha. He sprang off the porch and strode away down the road toward the beach. The children ran to him; wanted to go along. He sent them away harshly but they smiled and waved their brown little hands. Ellen came to the door and called after him. "Hurry home, dear," she said. "I'll have a bite ready in about an hour." He dared not say anything, for his voice would have broken and she would have known something was wrong. She was a very wise sort of person when something was troubling him. He waved his stubby paw of a hand to show that he had heard, and blindly hurried toward the Sound. Oddly enough, as he hurried away along the narrow path through the autumn woods, his mind busied itself with a new epic of the west that lived no longer. He mentally titled it: "Rustlers' Riot" and blocked in the outlines of his plot. One section of his brain was that of the careless author of gunslinging yarns, a section that seemed to be sapping the life from his own brain. He knew that the story would never be written, but he toyed with the idea. So far had Thig the emotionless, robot-being from Ortha drifted from the unquestioning worship of the Horde! "You have done well," announced Torp when Thig had completed his report on the resources and temperatures of various sections of Terra. "We now have located three worlds fit for colonization and so we will return to Ortha at once. "I will recommend the conquest of this planet, 72-P-3 at once and the complete destruction of all biped life upon it. The mental aberrations of the barbaric natives might lead to endless complications if they were permitted to exist outside our ordered way of life. I imagine that three circuits of the planet about its primary should prove sufficient for the purposes of complete liquidation." "But why," asked Thig slowly, "could we not disarm all the natives and exile them on one of the less desirable continents, Antarctica for example or Siberia? They are primitive humans even as our race was once a race of primitives. It is not our duty to help to attain our own degree of knowledge and comfort?" "Only the good of the Horde matters!" shouted Torp angrily. "Shall a race of feeble-witted beasts, such as these Earthmen, stand in the way of a superior race? We want their world, and so we will take it. The Law of the Horde states that all the universe is ours for the taking." "Let us get back to Ortha at once, then," gritted out Thig savagely. "Never again do I wish to set foot upon the soil of this mad planet. There are forces at work upon Earth that we of Ortha have long forgotten." "Check the blood of Thig for disease, Kam," ordered Torp shortly. "His words are highly irrational. Some form of fever perhaps native to this world. While you examine him I will blast off for Ortha." Thig followed Kam into the tiny laboratory and found a seat beside the squat scientist's desk. His eyes roamed over the familiar instruments and gauges, each in its own precise position in the cases along the walls. His gaze lingered longest on the stubby black ugliness of a decomposition blaster in its rack close to the deck. A blast of the invisible radiations from that weapon's hot throat and flesh or vegetable fiber rotted into flaky ashes. The ship trembled beneath their feet; it tore free from the feeble clutch of the sand about it, and they were rocketing skyward. Thig's broad fingers bit deep into the unyielding metal of his chair. Suddenly he knew that he must go back to Earth, back to Ellen and the children of the man he had helped destroy. He loved Ellen, and nothing must stand between them! The Hordes of Ortha must find some other world, an empty world—this planet was not for them. "Turn back!" he cried wildly. "I must go back to Earth. There is a woman there, helpless and alone, who needs me! The Horde does not need this planet." Kam eyed him coldly and lifted a shining hypodermic syringe from its case. He approached Thig warily, aware that disease often made a maniac of the finest members of the Horde. "No human being is more important than the Horde," he stated baldly. "This woman of whom you speak is merely one unit of the millions we must eliminate for the good of the Horde." Then it was that Thig went berserk. His fists slashed into the thick jaw of the scientist and his fingers ripped at the hard cords overlying the Orthan's vital throat tubes. His fingers and thumb gouged deep into Kam's startled throat and choked off any cry for assistance before it could be uttered. Kam's hand swept down to the holster swung from his intricate harness and dragged his blaster from it. Thig's other hand clamped over his and for long moments they swayed there, locked together in silent deadly struggle. The fate of a world hung in the balance as Kam's other hand fought against that lone arm of Thig. The scales swung in favor of Kam. Slowly the flaring snout of his weapon tilted upward until it reached the level of Thig's waist. Thig suddenly released his grip and dragged his enemy toward him. A sudden reversal of pressure on Kam's gun hand sent the weapon swivelling about full upon its owner's thick torso. Thig's fingers pressed down upon Kam's button finger, down upon the stud set into the grip of the decomposition blaster, and Kam's muscles turned to water. He shrieked. Before Thig's eyes half of his comrade's body sloughed away into foul corruption that swiftly gave way to hardened blobs of dessicated matter. Horror for what he had done—that he had slain one of his own Horde—made his limbs move woodenly. All of his thoughts were dulled for the moment. Painfully slow, he turned his body around toward the control blister, turned around on leaden feet, to look full into the narrowed icy eyes of his commander. He saw the heavy barrel of the blaster slashing down against his skull but he could not swing a fraction of an inch out of the way. His body seemed paralyzed. This was the end, he thought as he waited stupidly for the blow to fall, the end for Ellen and the kids and all the struggling races of Earth. He would never write another cowboy yarn—they would all be dead anyhow soon. Then a thunderclap exploded against his head and he dropped endlessly toward the deck. Blows rained against his skull. He wondered if Torp would ever cease to hammer at him and turn the deadly ray of the weapon upon him. Blood throbbed and pounded with every blow.... Bam, Bam, Bam, the blood pounded in his ears. Like repeated blows of a hammer they shook his booming head. No longer was Torp above him. He was in the corner of the laboratory, a crumpled blood-smeared heap of bruised flesh and bone. He was unfettered and the blood was caked upon his skull and in his matted hair. Torp must have thought he had killed him with those savage blows upon the head. Even Torp, thought Thig ruefully, gave way to the primitive rage of his ancestors at times; but to that very bit of unconscious atavism he now owed his life. A cool-headed robot of an Orthan would have efficiently used the blaster to destroy any possibility of remaining life in his unconscious body. Thig rolled slowly over so that his eye found the door into the control room. Torp would be coming back again to dispose of their bodies through the refuse lock. Already the body of Kam was gone. He wondered why he had been left until last. Perhaps Torp wished to take cultures of his blood and tissues to determine whether a disease was responsible for his sudden madness. The cases of fragile instruments were just above his head. Association of memories brought him the flash of the heavy blaster in its rack beneath them. His hand went up and felt the welcome hardness of the weapon. He tugged it free. In a moment he was on his knees crawling across the plates of the deck toward the door. Halfway across the floor he collapsed on his face, the metal of the gun making a harsh clang. He heard the feet of Torp scuffle out of silence and a choked cry in the man's throat squalled out into a senseless whinny. Thig raised himself up on a quivering elbow and slid the black length of the blaster in front of him. His eyes sought the doorway and stared full into the glaring vacant orbs of his commander. Torp leaned there watching him, his breath gurgling brokenly through his deep-bitten lips. The clawing marks of nails, fingernails, furrowed his face and chest. He was a madman! The deadly attack of Thig; his own violent avenging of Kam's death, and now the apparent return of the man he had killed come to life had all served to jolt his rigidly trained brain from its accustomed groove. The shock had been too much for the established thought-processes of the Orthan. So Thig shot him where he stood, mercifully, before that vacant mad stare set him, too, to gibbering and shrieking. Then he stepped over the skeleton-thing that had been Torp, using the new strength that victory had given him to drive him along. He had saved a world's civilization from extinction! The thought sobered him; yet, somehow, he was pleased that he had done so. After all, it had been the Earthwoman and the children he had been thinking of while he battled Kam, a selfish desire to protect them all. He went to the desk where Torp had been writing in the ship's log and read the last few nervously scrawled lines: Planet 72-P-3 unfit for colonization. Some pernicious disease that strikes at the brain centers and causes violent insanity is existent there. Thig, just returned from a survey of the planet, went mad and destroyed Kam. In turn I was forced to slay him. But it is not ended. Already I feel the insidious virus of.... And there his writing ended abruptly. Thig nodded. That would do it. He set the automatic pilot for the planet Ortha. Unless a rogue asteroid or a comet crossed the ship's path she would return safely to Ortha with that mute warning of danger on 72-P-3. The body of Torp would help to confirm his final message. Then Thig crossed the cabin to the auxiliary life boat there, one of a half-dozen space ships in miniature nested within the great ship's hull, and cut free from the mother vessel. He flipped the drive lever, felt the thrumming of the rockets driving him from the parent ship. The sensation of free flight against his new body was strangely exhilerating and heady. It was the newest of the emotions he had experienced on Earth since that day, so many months before, when he had felt the warmness of Ellen's lips tight against his. Thig flipped the drive lever, felt the thrumming of the rockets driving him from the parent ship. He swung about to the port, watched the flaming drive-rockets of the great exploratory ship hurl it toward far-away Ortha, and there was no regret in his mind that he was not returning to the planet of his first existence. He thought of the dull greys and blacks of his planet, of the monotonous routine of existence that had once been his—and his heart thrilled to the memories of the starry nights and perfect exciting days he had spent on his three month trip over Earth. He made a brief salute to the existence he had known, turned with a tiny sigh, and his fingers made brief adjustments in the controls. The rocket-thrum deepened, and the thin whistle of tenuous air clutching the ship echoed through the hull-plates. He thought of many things in those few moments. He watched the roundness of Earth flatten out, then take on the cup-like illusion that all planets had for an incoming ship. He reduced the drive of his rockets to a mere whisper, striving to control the impatience that crowded his mind. He shivered suddenly, remembering his utter callousness the first time he had sent a space ship whipping down toward the hills and valleys below. And there was a sickness within him when he fully realized that, despite his acquired memory and traits, he was an alien from outer space. He fingered the tiny scars that had completely obliterated the slight differences in his appearance from an Earthman's, and his fingers trembled a bit, as he bent and stared through the vision port. He said a brief prayer in his heart to a God whose presence he now felt very deeply. There were tears in the depths of his eyes, then, and memories were hot, bitter pains. Earth was not far below him. As he let gravity suck him earthward, he heaved a gasp of relief. He was no longer Thig, a creature of a Horde's creation, but Lewis Terry, writer of lurid gun-smoking tales of the West. He must remember that always. He had destroyed the real Terry and now, for the rest of his life, he must make up to the dead man's family. The knowledge that Ellen's love was not really meant for him would be a knife twisting in his heart but for her sake he must endure it. Her dreams and happiness must never be shattered. The bulge of Earth was flattening out now and he could see the outlines of Long Island in the growing twilight. A new plot was growing in the brain of Lewis Terry, a yarn about a cowboy suddenly transported to another world. He smiled ironically. He had seen those other worlds. Perhaps some day he would write about them.... He was Lewis Terry! He must remember that!

What is the plot of the story?

9

Three aliens from the planet Ortha, Thig, Kam and their Commander, Torp, have landed on Long Island to see if Earth is viable for the Orthans to take over. Thig captures a passing man, an author named Lewis Terry, and brings him back to the spaceship, where Torp decides that Thig should impersonate Terry to learn more about Earth. Terry’s knowledge is transferred to Thig, a process that kills Terry and arms Thig with with all of his memories. He is given plastic surgery to look like Terry, and he goes to live with Terry’s family. He is greeted by Terry’s three young children and his wife, Ellen; the children’s affection and Ellen’s kiss lead to sensations that confuse but excite Thig. The story then jumps ahead 12 weeks to when they return from their vacation, Thig having experienced many new emotions and sensations and having become very attached to Terry’s family. He knows that he must report to his Orthan colleagues, but has misgivings about doing so. Upon his arrival back to the ship, he tells Torp that Earth is ideal for their purposes, and Torp commends him and says he’ll recommend that Ortha take it over and eradicate the humans. Thig suggests that they instead disarm and exile the humans, and train them in the ways of Ortha. Torp responds angrily that they don’t need to waste their time with anyone outside the Orthan “Horde”. He asks Kam to check his blood for disease. Thig realizes that he loves Ellen and wants to protect her and the earthlings and says as much to Kam, who attempts to subdue him. After a struggle over Kam’s blaster, Thig kills him. Torp sees what he has done and flies into the type of rage Orthans don’t ascribe to, bludgeoning Thig until he thinks he is dead. Thig takes a blaster from a case above him and kills Torp. He reads in the ship log that Torp has written that Earth is not viable, because it infected Thig with a disease that led to him killing Kam and made it necessary for Torp to kill him. Thig puts the ship on autopilot toward Ortha, takes one of the small auxiliary ships, and heads back to Earth. He experiences many emotions, and regrets how callous he was when he first arrived on Earth and captured Lewis Terry. He vows to live as Terry in repayment to his family, and thinks knowing that Ellen doesn’t really love him, Thig, will be his punishment while he strives to make her happy. As he heads toward Long Island, the idea for a story develops in his mind. This one is about a cowboy that visits other worlds, worlds like the ones Thig has seen. He thinks maybe he could write this, and then reminds himself to remember that he is Lewis Terry now.

62198

QUEST OF THIG By BASIL WELLS Thig of Ortha was the vanguard of the conquering "HORDE." He had blasted across trackless space to subdue a defenseless world—only to meet on Earth emotions that were more deadly than weapons. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Thig carefully smoothed the dark sand and seaweed of the lonely beach over the metal lid of the flexible ringed tunnel that linked the grubby ship from another planet with the upper air. He looked out across the heaving waters of the Sound toward Connecticut. He stared appraisingly around at the luxuriant green growth of foliage further inland; and started toward the little stretch of trees and brush, walking carefully because of the lesser gravitation. Thig was shorter than the average Earthman—although on Ortha he was well above the average in height—but his body was thick and powerfully muscled. His skull was well-shaped and large; his features were regular, perhaps a trifle oversize, and his hair and eyes were a curiously matching blend of reddish brown. Oddest of all, he wore no garments, other than the necessary belt and straps to support his rod-like weapon of white metal and his pouches for food and specimens. The Orthan entered the narrow strip of trees and crossed to the little-used highway on the other side. Here he patiently sat down to wait for an Earthman or an Earthwoman to pass. His task now was to bring a native, intact if possible, back to the carefully buried space cruiser where his two fellows and himself would drain the creature's mentality of all its knowledge. In this way they could learn whether a planet was suited for colonization by later swarms of Orthans. Already they had charted over a hundred celestial bodies but of them all only three had proven worthy of consideration. This latest planet, however, 72-P-3 on the chart, appeared to be an ideal world in every respect. Sunlight, plenty of water and a dense atmospheric envelope made of 72-P-3 a paradise among planets. The explorer from another world crouched into the concealment of a leafy shrub. A creature was approaching. Its squat body was covered with baggy strips of bluish cloth and it carried a jointed rod of metal and wood in its paw. It walked upright as did the men of Ortha. Thig's cold eyes opened a trifle wider as he stared into the thing's stupid face. It was as though he was looking into a bit of polished metal at the reflection of himself! The Earthman was opposite now and he must waste no more precious time. The mighty muscles of the Orthan sent him hurtling across the intervening space in two prodigious bounds, and his hands clamped across the mouth and neck of the stranger.... Lewis Terry was going fishing. For a week the typewriter mill that had ground out a thousand assorted yarns of the untamed West and the frigid desolation of the Northwoods had been silent. Lewis wondered if he was going stale. He had sat every day for eight hours in front of that shiny-buttoned bane of the typist, but there were no results. Feebly he had punched a key two days ago and a $ sign had appeared. He hadn't dared touch the machine since. For Mr. Terry, that hard-hitting writer of two-gun action, had never been further west of Long Island than Elizabeth, and he had promised his wife, Ellen, that he would take the three children and herself on a trailer tour of the West that very summer. Since that promise, he could not write a word. Visions of whooping red-skinned Apaches and be-chapped outlaws raiding his little trailer home kept rolling up out of his subconscious. Yet he had to write at least three novelets and a fistful of short stories in the next two weeks to finance the great adventure—or the trip was off. So Lewis left the weathered old cottage in the early dawn and headed for his tubby old boat at the landing in an attempt to work out a salable yarn.... "Hey!" he shouted as a naked man sprang out of the bushes beside the road. "What's the trouble?" Then he had no time for further speech, the massive arms of the stranger had wound around him and two hamlike hands shut off his speech and his wind. He fought futilely against trained muscles. The hand clamping his throat relaxed for a moment and hacked along the side of his head. Blackness flooded the brain of Lewis, and he knew no more. "There it is," announced Thig, dropping the limp body of the captured Earthman to the metal deck-plates. "It is a male of the species that must have built the cities we saw as we landed." "He resembles Thig," announced Kam. "But for the strange covering he wears he might be Thig." "Thig will be this creature!" announced Torp. "With a psychic relay we will transfer the Earthman's memories and meager store of knowledge to the brain of Thig! He can then go out and scout this world without arousing suspicion. While he is gone, I will take Kam and explore the two inner planets." "You are the commander," said Thig. "But I wish this beast did not wear these clumsy sheathing upon his body. On Ortha we do not hamper the use of our limbs so." "Do not question the word of your commander," growled Torp, swelling out his thick chest menacingly. "It is for the good of our people that you disguise yourself as an Earthman." "For the good of the Horde," Thig intoned almost piously as he lifted Terry's body and headed for the laboratory. Service for the Horde was all that the men of Ortha knew. Carefully cultured and brought to life in the laboratories of their Horde, they knew neither father nor mother. Affection and love were entirely lacking in their early training and later life. They were trained antlike from childhood that only the growth and power of the Horde were of any moment. Men and women alike toiled and died like unfeeling robots of flesh and bone for the Horde. The Horde was their religion, their love-life, their everything! So it was that the bodies of the Earthman and the Orthan were strapped on two parallel tables of chill metal and the twin helmets, linked to one another by the intricacies of the psychic relay, put upon their heads. For ten hours or more the droning hum of the relay sucked Terry's brain dry of knowledge. The shock upon the nervous system of the Earthman proved too violent and his heart faltered after a time and stopped completely. Twice, with subtle drugs they restored pseudo-life to his body and kept the electrical impulses throbbing from his tortured brain, but after the third suspension of life Thig removed his helmet. "There is nothing more to learn," he informed his impassive comrades. "Now, let us get on with the plastic surgery that is required. My new body must return to its barbaric household before undue attention is aroused. And when I return I will take along some of the gleaming baubles we found on the red planet—these people value them highly." An hour later, his scars and altered cartilage already healed and painless, Thig again scraped sand over the entrance to the space ship and set out along the moonlit beach toward the nearest path running inland to his home. Memory was laying the country bare about him, Terry's own childhood memories of this particular section of Long Island. Here was the place where Jake and Ted had helped him dig for the buried treasure that old 'Notch-ear' Beggs had told them so exactly about. Remembrance of that episode gave Thig an idea about the little lump of jewels in his pocket. He had found them in a chest along the beach! He was coming up on the porch now and at the sound of his foot on the sagging boards the screen door burst open and three little Earth-creatures were hugging at his legs. An odd sensation, that his acquired memories labeled as pleasure, sent a warm glow upward from around his heart. Then he saw the slender red-haired shape of a woman, the mate of the dead man he knew, and confusion struck his well-trained brain. Men had no mates on Ortha, sex had been overthrown with all the other primitive impulses of barbarism; so he was incapable of understanding the emotions that swept through his acquired memory. Unsteadily he took her in his arms and felt her warm lips pressed, trembling, against his own. That same hot wave of pulsing blood choked achingly up into his throat. "Lew, dear," Ellen was asking, "where have you been all day? I called up at the landing but you were not there. I wanted to let you know that Saddlebag Publications sent a check for $50 for "Reversed Revolvers" and three other editors asked for shorts soon." "Shoulda got a hundred bucks for that yarn," grunted Thig, and gasped. For the moment he had been Lewis Terry and not Thig! So thoroughly had he acquired the knowledge of Terry that he found himself unconsciously adopting the thinking and mannerism of the other. All the better this way, he realized—more natural. "Sorry I was late," he said, digging into his pocket for the glittering baubles, "but I was poking around on the beach where we used to hunt treasure and I found an old chest. Inside it I found nothing but a handful of these." He flashed the jewels in front of Ellen's startled eyes and she clung, unbelieving, to his arm. "Why, Lew," she gasped, "they're worth a fortune! We can buy that new trailer now and have a rebuilt motor in the car. We can go west right away.... Hollywood, the Grand Canyon, cowboys!" "Uh huh," agreed the pseudo Lewis, memories of the ferocious savages and gunmen of his stories rendering him acutely unhappy. Sincerely he hoped that the west had reformed. "I saved some kraut and weiners," Ellen said. "Get washed up while I'm warming them up. Kids ate all the bread so I had to borrow some from the Eskoes. Want coffee, too?" "Mmmmmm," came from the depths of the chipped white wash-basin. "Home again," whispered Ellen as she stood beside Thig twelve weeks later and gazed tearfully at the weathered little gray house. She knelt beside the front stoop and reached for the key hidden beneath it. "The west was wonderful; tremendous, vast and beautiful," she went on as they climbed the steps, "but nowhere was there any place as beautiful as our own little strip of sky and water." Thig sank into a dusty old swing that hung on creaking chains from the exposed rafters of the porch roof. He looked down at the dusty gray car and the bulbous silvery bulk of the trailer that had been their living quarters for almost three months. Strange thoughts were afloat in the chaos of his cool Orthan brain. Tonight or tomorrow night at the latest he must contact his two fellows and report that Earth was a planetary paradise. No other world, including Ortha, was so well-favored and rich. An expeditionary force to wipe the grotesque civilizations of Earth out of existence would, of course, be necessary before the first units of new Hordes could be landed. And there Thig balked. Why must they destroy these people, imperfect though their civilization might be, to make room for the Hordes? Thig tried to tell himself that it was the transmitted thoughts of the dead Earthman that made him feel so, but he was not too sure. For three months he had lived with people who loved, hated, wept and sacrificed for reasons that he had never known existed. He had learned the heady glory of thinking for himself and making his own decisions. He had experienced the primitive joy of matching his wits and tongue against the wits of other unpredictable human beings. There was no abrupt division of men and women into definite classes of endeavor. A laborer thought the same thoughts that a governor might think. Uncertainty added zest to every day's life. The Orthan had come to question the sole devotion of the individual to the Horde to the exclusion of all other interests. What, he wondered, would one new world—or a hundred—populated by the Hordes add to the progress of humanity? For a hundred thousand years the Orthan civilization had remained static, its energies directed into certain well-defined channels. They were mindless bees maintaining their vast mechanical hives. There was that moment on the brink of the Grand Canyon when Ellen had caught his arm breathlessly at all the beauty spread away there beneath them. There were mornings in the desert when the sun painted in lurid red the peaks above the harsh black-and-whites of the sagebrush and cactus slopes. There was the little boy, his body burning with fever, who nestled trustingly against his tense man's body and slept—the son of Ellen and the man he had destroyed. Thig groaned. He was a weakling to let sentimentality so get the better of his judgment. He would go now to the space ship and urge them to blast off for Ortha. He sprang off the porch and strode away down the road toward the beach. The children ran to him; wanted to go along. He sent them away harshly but they smiled and waved their brown little hands. Ellen came to the door and called after him. "Hurry home, dear," she said. "I'll have a bite ready in about an hour." He dared not say anything, for his voice would have broken and she would have known something was wrong. She was a very wise sort of person when something was troubling him. He waved his stubby paw of a hand to show that he had heard, and blindly hurried toward the Sound. Oddly enough, as he hurried away along the narrow path through the autumn woods, his mind busied itself with a new epic of the west that lived no longer. He mentally titled it: "Rustlers' Riot" and blocked in the outlines of his plot. One section of his brain was that of the careless author of gunslinging yarns, a section that seemed to be sapping the life from his own brain. He knew that the story would never be written, but he toyed with the idea. So far had Thig the emotionless, robot-being from Ortha drifted from the unquestioning worship of the Horde! "You have done well," announced Torp when Thig had completed his report on the resources and temperatures of various sections of Terra. "We now have located three worlds fit for colonization and so we will return to Ortha at once. "I will recommend the conquest of this planet, 72-P-3 at once and the complete destruction of all biped life upon it. The mental aberrations of the barbaric natives might lead to endless complications if they were permitted to exist outside our ordered way of life. I imagine that three circuits of the planet about its primary should prove sufficient for the purposes of complete liquidation." "But why," asked Thig slowly, "could we not disarm all the natives and exile them on one of the less desirable continents, Antarctica for example or Siberia? They are primitive humans even as our race was once a race of primitives. It is not our duty to help to attain our own degree of knowledge and comfort?" "Only the good of the Horde matters!" shouted Torp angrily. "Shall a race of feeble-witted beasts, such as these Earthmen, stand in the way of a superior race? We want their world, and so we will take it. The Law of the Horde states that all the universe is ours for the taking." "Let us get back to Ortha at once, then," gritted out Thig savagely. "Never again do I wish to set foot upon the soil of this mad planet. There are forces at work upon Earth that we of Ortha have long forgotten." "Check the blood of Thig for disease, Kam," ordered Torp shortly. "His words are highly irrational. Some form of fever perhaps native to this world. While you examine him I will blast off for Ortha." Thig followed Kam into the tiny laboratory and found a seat beside the squat scientist's desk. His eyes roamed over the familiar instruments and gauges, each in its own precise position in the cases along the walls. His gaze lingered longest on the stubby black ugliness of a decomposition blaster in its rack close to the deck. A blast of the invisible radiations from that weapon's hot throat and flesh or vegetable fiber rotted into flaky ashes. The ship trembled beneath their feet; it tore free from the feeble clutch of the sand about it, and they were rocketing skyward. Thig's broad fingers bit deep into the unyielding metal of his chair. Suddenly he knew that he must go back to Earth, back to Ellen and the children of the man he had helped destroy. He loved Ellen, and nothing must stand between them! The Hordes of Ortha must find some other world, an empty world—this planet was not for them. "Turn back!" he cried wildly. "I must go back to Earth. There is a woman there, helpless and alone, who needs me! The Horde does not need this planet." Kam eyed him coldly and lifted a shining hypodermic syringe from its case. He approached Thig warily, aware that disease often made a maniac of the finest members of the Horde. "No human being is more important than the Horde," he stated baldly. "This woman of whom you speak is merely one unit of the millions we must eliminate for the good of the Horde." Then it was that Thig went berserk. His fists slashed into the thick jaw of the scientist and his fingers ripped at the hard cords overlying the Orthan's vital throat tubes. His fingers and thumb gouged deep into Kam's startled throat and choked off any cry for assistance before it could be uttered. Kam's hand swept down to the holster swung from his intricate harness and dragged his blaster from it. Thig's other hand clamped over his and for long moments they swayed there, locked together in silent deadly struggle. The fate of a world hung in the balance as Kam's other hand fought against that lone arm of Thig. The scales swung in favor of Kam. Slowly the flaring snout of his weapon tilted upward until it reached the level of Thig's waist. Thig suddenly released his grip and dragged his enemy toward him. A sudden reversal of pressure on Kam's gun hand sent the weapon swivelling about full upon its owner's thick torso. Thig's fingers pressed down upon Kam's button finger, down upon the stud set into the grip of the decomposition blaster, and Kam's muscles turned to water. He shrieked. Before Thig's eyes half of his comrade's body sloughed away into foul corruption that swiftly gave way to hardened blobs of dessicated matter. Horror for what he had done—that he had slain one of his own Horde—made his limbs move woodenly. All of his thoughts were dulled for the moment. Painfully slow, he turned his body around toward the control blister, turned around on leaden feet, to look full into the narrowed icy eyes of his commander. He saw the heavy barrel of the blaster slashing down against his skull but he could not swing a fraction of an inch out of the way. His body seemed paralyzed. This was the end, he thought as he waited stupidly for the blow to fall, the end for Ellen and the kids and all the struggling races of Earth. He would never write another cowboy yarn—they would all be dead anyhow soon. Then a thunderclap exploded against his head and he dropped endlessly toward the deck. Blows rained against his skull. He wondered if Torp would ever cease to hammer at him and turn the deadly ray of the weapon upon him. Blood throbbed and pounded with every blow.... Bam, Bam, Bam, the blood pounded in his ears. Like repeated blows of a hammer they shook his booming head. No longer was Torp above him. He was in the corner of the laboratory, a crumpled blood-smeared heap of bruised flesh and bone. He was unfettered and the blood was caked upon his skull and in his matted hair. Torp must have thought he had killed him with those savage blows upon the head. Even Torp, thought Thig ruefully, gave way to the primitive rage of his ancestors at times; but to that very bit of unconscious atavism he now owed his life. A cool-headed robot of an Orthan would have efficiently used the blaster to destroy any possibility of remaining life in his unconscious body. Thig rolled slowly over so that his eye found the door into the control room. Torp would be coming back again to dispose of their bodies through the refuse lock. Already the body of Kam was gone. He wondered why he had been left until last. Perhaps Torp wished to take cultures of his blood and tissues to determine whether a disease was responsible for his sudden madness. The cases of fragile instruments were just above his head. Association of memories brought him the flash of the heavy blaster in its rack beneath them. His hand went up and felt the welcome hardness of the weapon. He tugged it free. In a moment he was on his knees crawling across the plates of the deck toward the door. Halfway across the floor he collapsed on his face, the metal of the gun making a harsh clang. He heard the feet of Torp scuffle out of silence and a choked cry in the man's throat squalled out into a senseless whinny. Thig raised himself up on a quivering elbow and slid the black length of the blaster in front of him. His eyes sought the doorway and stared full into the glaring vacant orbs of his commander. Torp leaned there watching him, his breath gurgling brokenly through his deep-bitten lips. The clawing marks of nails, fingernails, furrowed his face and chest. He was a madman! The deadly attack of Thig; his own violent avenging of Kam's death, and now the apparent return of the man he had killed come to life had all served to jolt his rigidly trained brain from its accustomed groove. The shock had been too much for the established thought-processes of the Orthan. So Thig shot him where he stood, mercifully, before that vacant mad stare set him, too, to gibbering and shrieking. Then he stepped over the skeleton-thing that had been Torp, using the new strength that victory had given him to drive him along. He had saved a world's civilization from extinction! The thought sobered him; yet, somehow, he was pleased that he had done so. After all, it had been the Earthwoman and the children he had been thinking of while he battled Kam, a selfish desire to protect them all. He went to the desk where Torp had been writing in the ship's log and read the last few nervously scrawled lines: Planet 72-P-3 unfit for colonization. Some pernicious disease that strikes at the brain centers and causes violent insanity is existent there. Thig, just returned from a survey of the planet, went mad and destroyed Kam. In turn I was forced to slay him. But it is not ended. Already I feel the insidious virus of.... And there his writing ended abruptly. Thig nodded. That would do it. He set the automatic pilot for the planet Ortha. Unless a rogue asteroid or a comet crossed the ship's path she would return safely to Ortha with that mute warning of danger on 72-P-3. The body of Torp would help to confirm his final message. Then Thig crossed the cabin to the auxiliary life boat there, one of a half-dozen space ships in miniature nested within the great ship's hull, and cut free from the mother vessel. He flipped the drive lever, felt the thrumming of the rockets driving him from the parent ship. The sensation of free flight against his new body was strangely exhilerating and heady. It was the newest of the emotions he had experienced on Earth since that day, so many months before, when he had felt the warmness of Ellen's lips tight against his. Thig flipped the drive lever, felt the thrumming of the rockets driving him from the parent ship. He swung about to the port, watched the flaming drive-rockets of the great exploratory ship hurl it toward far-away Ortha, and there was no regret in his mind that he was not returning to the planet of his first existence. He thought of the dull greys and blacks of his planet, of the monotonous routine of existence that had once been his—and his heart thrilled to the memories of the starry nights and perfect exciting days he had spent on his three month trip over Earth. He made a brief salute to the existence he had known, turned with a tiny sigh, and his fingers made brief adjustments in the controls. The rocket-thrum deepened, and the thin whistle of tenuous air clutching the ship echoed through the hull-plates. He thought of many things in those few moments. He watched the roundness of Earth flatten out, then take on the cup-like illusion that all planets had for an incoming ship. He reduced the drive of his rockets to a mere whisper, striving to control the impatience that crowded his mind. He shivered suddenly, remembering his utter callousness the first time he had sent a space ship whipping down toward the hills and valleys below. And there was a sickness within him when he fully realized that, despite his acquired memory and traits, he was an alien from outer space. He fingered the tiny scars that had completely obliterated the slight differences in his appearance from an Earthman's, and his fingers trembled a bit, as he bent and stared through the vision port. He said a brief prayer in his heart to a God whose presence he now felt very deeply. There were tears in the depths of his eyes, then, and memories were hot, bitter pains. Earth was not far below him. As he let gravity suck him earthward, he heaved a gasp of relief. He was no longer Thig, a creature of a Horde's creation, but Lewis Terry, writer of lurid gun-smoking tales of the West. He must remember that always. He had destroyed the real Terry and now, for the rest of his life, he must make up to the dead man's family. The knowledge that Ellen's love was not really meant for him would be a knife twisting in his heart but for her sake he must endure it. Her dreams and happiness must never be shattered. The bulge of Earth was flattening out now and he could see the outlines of Long Island in the growing twilight. A new plot was growing in the brain of Lewis Terry, a yarn about a cowboy suddenly transported to another world. He smiled ironically. He had seen those other worlds. Perhaps some day he would write about them.... He was Lewis Terry! He must remember that!

What is the plot of the story?

8

The story begins with the protagonist Thig, who is an alien from the planet Ortha, on a mission to investigate Earth’s suitability to be colonized by the conquering Horde he represents. Thig is a bit shorter than the average human with a thick, muscular body and reddish hair. His spaceship is hidden below the sand at a Long Island beach, and after he emerges, he hides behind the brush along a nearby road. He sees a human that looks remarkably like himself. This human turns out to be a Western writer named Lewis Terry, who lives nearby with his wife and children. Lew, as his wife calls him, had been out fishing as he tried to plot out new stories to fund his proposed trip out West, where he could gather research to make his writing more believable. Thig knocks him out and takes him back to his ship, where he and his fellow Orthans Kam and Torp begin the process of transferring Lew’s memories, thoughts, and emotions into Thig’s mind. This allows him to disguise himself as he researches Earth’s environment and the humans that populate it. After undergoing plastic surgery to better mimic Lew’s appearance, Thig returns to Lew’s home, guided by his memories of the past and human emotions. Thig meets Lew’s children and experiences emotions of love for the first time. These feelings are further complicated when he meets Ellen, Lew’s wife, who kisses him and floods Thig’s new Lew-mind with romantic emotions. Thig shows Ellen the treasures he has brought with him from Mars, and Ellen says they can now afford to pay for their trip out West. They spend the next three months exploring the West, during which time Thig plunges deeper into human emotion and is overwhelmed by the beauty of Earth. Upon his return to the ship, Thig attempts to convince Kam and Torp to change their plans about destroying humankind, and they think Thig has contracted some kind of disease. When Kam goes to test Thig, Thig kills him with a decomposition blaster; in turn, Torp beats Thig until he thinks he has killed him. Torp then returns to his desk and makes a note that Earth is probably not suitable for the Horde due to a mysterious disease that had overtaken Thig. Thig kills Torp and returns to Earth in an escape vessel, sending the ship back to Ortha with Torp’s message. Torp goes back to Ellen and the children, intending to spend the rest of his life living as Lewis Terry.

62198

QUEST OF THIG By BASIL WELLS Thig of Ortha was the vanguard of the conquering "HORDE." He had blasted across trackless space to subdue a defenseless world—only to meet on Earth emotions that were more deadly than weapons. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Thig carefully smoothed the dark sand and seaweed of the lonely beach over the metal lid of the flexible ringed tunnel that linked the grubby ship from another planet with the upper air. He looked out across the heaving waters of the Sound toward Connecticut. He stared appraisingly around at the luxuriant green growth of foliage further inland; and started toward the little stretch of trees and brush, walking carefully because of the lesser gravitation. Thig was shorter than the average Earthman—although on Ortha he was well above the average in height—but his body was thick and powerfully muscled. His skull was well-shaped and large; his features were regular, perhaps a trifle oversize, and his hair and eyes were a curiously matching blend of reddish brown. Oddest of all, he wore no garments, other than the necessary belt and straps to support his rod-like weapon of white metal and his pouches for food and specimens. The Orthan entered the narrow strip of trees and crossed to the little-used highway on the other side. Here he patiently sat down to wait for an Earthman or an Earthwoman to pass. His task now was to bring a native, intact if possible, back to the carefully buried space cruiser where his two fellows and himself would drain the creature's mentality of all its knowledge. In this way they could learn whether a planet was suited for colonization by later swarms of Orthans. Already they had charted over a hundred celestial bodies but of them all only three had proven worthy of consideration. This latest planet, however, 72-P-3 on the chart, appeared to be an ideal world in every respect. Sunlight, plenty of water and a dense atmospheric envelope made of 72-P-3 a paradise among planets. The explorer from another world crouched into the concealment of a leafy shrub. A creature was approaching. Its squat body was covered with baggy strips of bluish cloth and it carried a jointed rod of metal and wood in its paw. It walked upright as did the men of Ortha. Thig's cold eyes opened a trifle wider as he stared into the thing's stupid face. It was as though he was looking into a bit of polished metal at the reflection of himself! The Earthman was opposite now and he must waste no more precious time. The mighty muscles of the Orthan sent him hurtling across the intervening space in two prodigious bounds, and his hands clamped across the mouth and neck of the stranger.... Lewis Terry was going fishing. For a week the typewriter mill that had ground out a thousand assorted yarns of the untamed West and the frigid desolation of the Northwoods had been silent. Lewis wondered if he was going stale. He had sat every day for eight hours in front of that shiny-buttoned bane of the typist, but there were no results. Feebly he had punched a key two days ago and a $ sign had appeared. He hadn't dared touch the machine since. For Mr. Terry, that hard-hitting writer of two-gun action, had never been further west of Long Island than Elizabeth, and he had promised his wife, Ellen, that he would take the three children and herself on a trailer tour of the West that very summer. Since that promise, he could not write a word. Visions of whooping red-skinned Apaches and be-chapped outlaws raiding his little trailer home kept rolling up out of his subconscious. Yet he had to write at least three novelets and a fistful of short stories in the next two weeks to finance the great adventure—or the trip was off. So Lewis left the weathered old cottage in the early dawn and headed for his tubby old boat at the landing in an attempt to work out a salable yarn.... "Hey!" he shouted as a naked man sprang out of the bushes beside the road. "What's the trouble?" Then he had no time for further speech, the massive arms of the stranger had wound around him and two hamlike hands shut off his speech and his wind. He fought futilely against trained muscles. The hand clamping his throat relaxed for a moment and hacked along the side of his head. Blackness flooded the brain of Lewis, and he knew no more. "There it is," announced Thig, dropping the limp body of the captured Earthman to the metal deck-plates. "It is a male of the species that must have built the cities we saw as we landed." "He resembles Thig," announced Kam. "But for the strange covering he wears he might be Thig." "Thig will be this creature!" announced Torp. "With a psychic relay we will transfer the Earthman's memories and meager store of knowledge to the brain of Thig! He can then go out and scout this world without arousing suspicion. While he is gone, I will take Kam and explore the two inner planets." "You are the commander," said Thig. "But I wish this beast did not wear these clumsy sheathing upon his body. On Ortha we do not hamper the use of our limbs so." "Do not question the word of your commander," growled Torp, swelling out his thick chest menacingly. "It is for the good of our people that you disguise yourself as an Earthman." "For the good of the Horde," Thig intoned almost piously as he lifted Terry's body and headed for the laboratory. Service for the Horde was all that the men of Ortha knew. Carefully cultured and brought to life in the laboratories of their Horde, they knew neither father nor mother. Affection and love were entirely lacking in their early training and later life. They were trained antlike from childhood that only the growth and power of the Horde were of any moment. Men and women alike toiled and died like unfeeling robots of flesh and bone for the Horde. The Horde was their religion, their love-life, their everything! So it was that the bodies of the Earthman and the Orthan were strapped on two parallel tables of chill metal and the twin helmets, linked to one another by the intricacies of the psychic relay, put upon their heads. For ten hours or more the droning hum of the relay sucked Terry's brain dry of knowledge. The shock upon the nervous system of the Earthman proved too violent and his heart faltered after a time and stopped completely. Twice, with subtle drugs they restored pseudo-life to his body and kept the electrical impulses throbbing from his tortured brain, but after the third suspension of life Thig removed his helmet. "There is nothing more to learn," he informed his impassive comrades. "Now, let us get on with the plastic surgery that is required. My new body must return to its barbaric household before undue attention is aroused. And when I return I will take along some of the gleaming baubles we found on the red planet—these people value them highly." An hour later, his scars and altered cartilage already healed and painless, Thig again scraped sand over the entrance to the space ship and set out along the moonlit beach toward the nearest path running inland to his home. Memory was laying the country bare about him, Terry's own childhood memories of this particular section of Long Island. Here was the place where Jake and Ted had helped him dig for the buried treasure that old 'Notch-ear' Beggs had told them so exactly about. Remembrance of that episode gave Thig an idea about the little lump of jewels in his pocket. He had found them in a chest along the beach! He was coming up on the porch now and at the sound of his foot on the sagging boards the screen door burst open and three little Earth-creatures were hugging at his legs. An odd sensation, that his acquired memories labeled as pleasure, sent a warm glow upward from around his heart. Then he saw the slender red-haired shape of a woman, the mate of the dead man he knew, and confusion struck his well-trained brain. Men had no mates on Ortha, sex had been overthrown with all the other primitive impulses of barbarism; so he was incapable of understanding the emotions that swept through his acquired memory. Unsteadily he took her in his arms and felt her warm lips pressed, trembling, against his own. That same hot wave of pulsing blood choked achingly up into his throat. "Lew, dear," Ellen was asking, "where have you been all day? I called up at the landing but you were not there. I wanted to let you know that Saddlebag Publications sent a check for $50 for "Reversed Revolvers" and three other editors asked for shorts soon." "Shoulda got a hundred bucks for that yarn," grunted Thig, and gasped. For the moment he had been Lewis Terry and not Thig! So thoroughly had he acquired the knowledge of Terry that he found himself unconsciously adopting the thinking and mannerism of the other. All the better this way, he realized—more natural. "Sorry I was late," he said, digging into his pocket for the glittering baubles, "but I was poking around on the beach where we used to hunt treasure and I found an old chest. Inside it I found nothing but a handful of these." He flashed the jewels in front of Ellen's startled eyes and she clung, unbelieving, to his arm. "Why, Lew," she gasped, "they're worth a fortune! We can buy that new trailer now and have a rebuilt motor in the car. We can go west right away.... Hollywood, the Grand Canyon, cowboys!" "Uh huh," agreed the pseudo Lewis, memories of the ferocious savages and gunmen of his stories rendering him acutely unhappy. Sincerely he hoped that the west had reformed. "I saved some kraut and weiners," Ellen said. "Get washed up while I'm warming them up. Kids ate all the bread so I had to borrow some from the Eskoes. Want coffee, too?" "Mmmmmm," came from the depths of the chipped white wash-basin. "Home again," whispered Ellen as she stood beside Thig twelve weeks later and gazed tearfully at the weathered little gray house. She knelt beside the front stoop and reached for the key hidden beneath it. "The west was wonderful; tremendous, vast and beautiful," she went on as they climbed the steps, "but nowhere was there any place as beautiful as our own little strip of sky and water." Thig sank into a dusty old swing that hung on creaking chains from the exposed rafters of the porch roof. He looked down at the dusty gray car and the bulbous silvery bulk of the trailer that had been their living quarters for almost three months. Strange thoughts were afloat in the chaos of his cool Orthan brain. Tonight or tomorrow night at the latest he must contact his two fellows and report that Earth was a planetary paradise. No other world, including Ortha, was so well-favored and rich. An expeditionary force to wipe the grotesque civilizations of Earth out of existence would, of course, be necessary before the first units of new Hordes could be landed. And there Thig balked. Why must they destroy these people, imperfect though their civilization might be, to make room for the Hordes? Thig tried to tell himself that it was the transmitted thoughts of the dead Earthman that made him feel so, but he was not too sure. For three months he had lived with people who loved, hated, wept and sacrificed for reasons that he had never known existed. He had learned the heady glory of thinking for himself and making his own decisions. He had experienced the primitive joy of matching his wits and tongue against the wits of other unpredictable human beings. There was no abrupt division of men and women into definite classes of endeavor. A laborer thought the same thoughts that a governor might think. Uncertainty added zest to every day's life. The Orthan had come to question the sole devotion of the individual to the Horde to the exclusion of all other interests. What, he wondered, would one new world—or a hundred—populated by the Hordes add to the progress of humanity? For a hundred thousand years the Orthan civilization had remained static, its energies directed into certain well-defined channels. They were mindless bees maintaining their vast mechanical hives. There was that moment on the brink of the Grand Canyon when Ellen had caught his arm breathlessly at all the beauty spread away there beneath them. There were mornings in the desert when the sun painted in lurid red the peaks above the harsh black-and-whites of the sagebrush and cactus slopes. There was the little boy, his body burning with fever, who nestled trustingly against his tense man's body and slept—the son of Ellen and the man he had destroyed. Thig groaned. He was a weakling to let sentimentality so get the better of his judgment. He would go now to the space ship and urge them to blast off for Ortha. He sprang off the porch and strode away down the road toward the beach. The children ran to him; wanted to go along. He sent them away harshly but they smiled and waved their brown little hands. Ellen came to the door and called after him. "Hurry home, dear," she said. "I'll have a bite ready in about an hour." He dared not say anything, for his voice would have broken and she would have known something was wrong. She was a very wise sort of person when something was troubling him. He waved his stubby paw of a hand to show that he had heard, and blindly hurried toward the Sound. Oddly enough, as he hurried away along the narrow path through the autumn woods, his mind busied itself with a new epic of the west that lived no longer. He mentally titled it: "Rustlers' Riot" and blocked in the outlines of his plot. One section of his brain was that of the careless author of gunslinging yarns, a section that seemed to be sapping the life from his own brain. He knew that the story would never be written, but he toyed with the idea. So far had Thig the emotionless, robot-being from Ortha drifted from the unquestioning worship of the Horde! "You have done well," announced Torp when Thig had completed his report on the resources and temperatures of various sections of Terra. "We now have located three worlds fit for colonization and so we will return to Ortha at once. "I will recommend the conquest of this planet, 72-P-3 at once and the complete destruction of all biped life upon it. The mental aberrations of the barbaric natives might lead to endless complications if they were permitted to exist outside our ordered way of life. I imagine that three circuits of the planet about its primary should prove sufficient for the purposes of complete liquidation." "But why," asked Thig slowly, "could we not disarm all the natives and exile them on one of the less desirable continents, Antarctica for example or Siberia? They are primitive humans even as our race was once a race of primitives. It is not our duty to help to attain our own degree of knowledge and comfort?" "Only the good of the Horde matters!" shouted Torp angrily. "Shall a race of feeble-witted beasts, such as these Earthmen, stand in the way of a superior race? We want their world, and so we will take it. The Law of the Horde states that all the universe is ours for the taking." "Let us get back to Ortha at once, then," gritted out Thig savagely. "Never again do I wish to set foot upon the soil of this mad planet. There are forces at work upon Earth that we of Ortha have long forgotten." "Check the blood of Thig for disease, Kam," ordered Torp shortly. "His words are highly irrational. Some form of fever perhaps native to this world. While you examine him I will blast off for Ortha." Thig followed Kam into the tiny laboratory and found a seat beside the squat scientist's desk. His eyes roamed over the familiar instruments and gauges, each in its own precise position in the cases along the walls. His gaze lingered longest on the stubby black ugliness of a decomposition blaster in its rack close to the deck. A blast of the invisible radiations from that weapon's hot throat and flesh or vegetable fiber rotted into flaky ashes. The ship trembled beneath their feet; it tore free from the feeble clutch of the sand about it, and they were rocketing skyward. Thig's broad fingers bit deep into the unyielding metal of his chair. Suddenly he knew that he must go back to Earth, back to Ellen and the children of the man he had helped destroy. He loved Ellen, and nothing must stand between them! The Hordes of Ortha must find some other world, an empty world—this planet was not for them. "Turn back!" he cried wildly. "I must go back to Earth. There is a woman there, helpless and alone, who needs me! The Horde does not need this planet." Kam eyed him coldly and lifted a shining hypodermic syringe from its case. He approached Thig warily, aware that disease often made a maniac of the finest members of the Horde. "No human being is more important than the Horde," he stated baldly. "This woman of whom you speak is merely one unit of the millions we must eliminate for the good of the Horde." Then it was that Thig went berserk. His fists slashed into the thick jaw of the scientist and his fingers ripped at the hard cords overlying the Orthan's vital throat tubes. His fingers and thumb gouged deep into Kam's startled throat and choked off any cry for assistance before it could be uttered. Kam's hand swept down to the holster swung from his intricate harness and dragged his blaster from it. Thig's other hand clamped over his and for long moments they swayed there, locked together in silent deadly struggle. The fate of a world hung in the balance as Kam's other hand fought against that lone arm of Thig. The scales swung in favor of Kam. Slowly the flaring snout of his weapon tilted upward until it reached the level of Thig's waist. Thig suddenly released his grip and dragged his enemy toward him. A sudden reversal of pressure on Kam's gun hand sent the weapon swivelling about full upon its owner's thick torso. Thig's fingers pressed down upon Kam's button finger, down upon the stud set into the grip of the decomposition blaster, and Kam's muscles turned to water. He shrieked. Before Thig's eyes half of his comrade's body sloughed away into foul corruption that swiftly gave way to hardened blobs of dessicated matter. Horror for what he had done—that he had slain one of his own Horde—made his limbs move woodenly. All of his thoughts were dulled for the moment. Painfully slow, he turned his body around toward the control blister, turned around on leaden feet, to look full into the narrowed icy eyes of his commander. He saw the heavy barrel of the blaster slashing down against his skull but he could not swing a fraction of an inch out of the way. His body seemed paralyzed. This was the end, he thought as he waited stupidly for the blow to fall, the end for Ellen and the kids and all the struggling races of Earth. He would never write another cowboy yarn—they would all be dead anyhow soon. Then a thunderclap exploded against his head and he dropped endlessly toward the deck. Blows rained against his skull. He wondered if Torp would ever cease to hammer at him and turn the deadly ray of the weapon upon him. Blood throbbed and pounded with every blow.... Bam, Bam, Bam, the blood pounded in his ears. Like repeated blows of a hammer they shook his booming head. No longer was Torp above him. He was in the corner of the laboratory, a crumpled blood-smeared heap of bruised flesh and bone. He was unfettered and the blood was caked upon his skull and in his matted hair. Torp must have thought he had killed him with those savage blows upon the head. Even Torp, thought Thig ruefully, gave way to the primitive rage of his ancestors at times; but to that very bit of unconscious atavism he now owed his life. A cool-headed robot of an Orthan would have efficiently used the blaster to destroy any possibility of remaining life in his unconscious body. Thig rolled slowly over so that his eye found the door into the control room. Torp would be coming back again to dispose of their bodies through the refuse lock. Already the body of Kam was gone. He wondered why he had been left until last. Perhaps Torp wished to take cultures of his blood and tissues to determine whether a disease was responsible for his sudden madness. The cases of fragile instruments were just above his head. Association of memories brought him the flash of the heavy blaster in its rack beneath them. His hand went up and felt the welcome hardness of the weapon. He tugged it free. In a moment he was on his knees crawling across the plates of the deck toward the door. Halfway across the floor he collapsed on his face, the metal of the gun making a harsh clang. He heard the feet of Torp scuffle out of silence and a choked cry in the man's throat squalled out into a senseless whinny. Thig raised himself up on a quivering elbow and slid the black length of the blaster in front of him. His eyes sought the doorway and stared full into the glaring vacant orbs of his commander. Torp leaned there watching him, his breath gurgling brokenly through his deep-bitten lips. The clawing marks of nails, fingernails, furrowed his face and chest. He was a madman! The deadly attack of Thig; his own violent avenging of Kam's death, and now the apparent return of the man he had killed come to life had all served to jolt his rigidly trained brain from its accustomed groove. The shock had been too much for the established thought-processes of the Orthan. So Thig shot him where he stood, mercifully, before that vacant mad stare set him, too, to gibbering and shrieking. Then he stepped over the skeleton-thing that had been Torp, using the new strength that victory had given him to drive him along. He had saved a world's civilization from extinction! The thought sobered him; yet, somehow, he was pleased that he had done so. After all, it had been the Earthwoman and the children he had been thinking of while he battled Kam, a selfish desire to protect them all. He went to the desk where Torp had been writing in the ship's log and read the last few nervously scrawled lines: Planet 72-P-3 unfit for colonization. Some pernicious disease that strikes at the brain centers and causes violent insanity is existent there. Thig, just returned from a survey of the planet, went mad and destroyed Kam. In turn I was forced to slay him. But it is not ended. Already I feel the insidious virus of.... And there his writing ended abruptly. Thig nodded. That would do it. He set the automatic pilot for the planet Ortha. Unless a rogue asteroid or a comet crossed the ship's path she would return safely to Ortha with that mute warning of danger on 72-P-3. The body of Torp would help to confirm his final message. Then Thig crossed the cabin to the auxiliary life boat there, one of a half-dozen space ships in miniature nested within the great ship's hull, and cut free from the mother vessel. He flipped the drive lever, felt the thrumming of the rockets driving him from the parent ship. The sensation of free flight against his new body was strangely exhilerating and heady. It was the newest of the emotions he had experienced on Earth since that day, so many months before, when he had felt the warmness of Ellen's lips tight against his. Thig flipped the drive lever, felt the thrumming of the rockets driving him from the parent ship. He swung about to the port, watched the flaming drive-rockets of the great exploratory ship hurl it toward far-away Ortha, and there was no regret in his mind that he was not returning to the planet of his first existence. He thought of the dull greys and blacks of his planet, of the monotonous routine of existence that had once been his—and his heart thrilled to the memories of the starry nights and perfect exciting days he had spent on his three month trip over Earth. He made a brief salute to the existence he had known, turned with a tiny sigh, and his fingers made brief adjustments in the controls. The rocket-thrum deepened, and the thin whistle of tenuous air clutching the ship echoed through the hull-plates. He thought of many things in those few moments. He watched the roundness of Earth flatten out, then take on the cup-like illusion that all planets had for an incoming ship. He reduced the drive of his rockets to a mere whisper, striving to control the impatience that crowded his mind. He shivered suddenly, remembering his utter callousness the first time he had sent a space ship whipping down toward the hills and valleys below. And there was a sickness within him when he fully realized that, despite his acquired memory and traits, he was an alien from outer space. He fingered the tiny scars that had completely obliterated the slight differences in his appearance from an Earthman's, and his fingers trembled a bit, as he bent and stared through the vision port. He said a brief prayer in his heart to a God whose presence he now felt very deeply. There were tears in the depths of his eyes, then, and memories were hot, bitter pains. Earth was not far below him. As he let gravity suck him earthward, he heaved a gasp of relief. He was no longer Thig, a creature of a Horde's creation, but Lewis Terry, writer of lurid gun-smoking tales of the West. He must remember that always. He had destroyed the real Terry and now, for the rest of his life, he must make up to the dead man's family. The knowledge that Ellen's love was not really meant for him would be a knife twisting in his heart but for her sake he must endure it. Her dreams and happiness must never be shattered. The bulge of Earth was flattening out now and he could see the outlines of Long Island in the growing twilight. A new plot was growing in the brain of Lewis Terry, a yarn about a cowboy suddenly transported to another world. He smiled ironically. He had seen those other worlds. Perhaps some day he would write about them.... He was Lewis Terry! He must remember that!

What is the plot of the story?

1

Thig appears naked on Long Island and waits for an Earthman to come near. Lewis Terry, a writer of Westerns, walks by Thig. He went out on his boat to fish, and Thig jumps out at Terry and kills him. Thig is excited to help his people, the Orthans, discover a new place to inhabit. On planet Ortha, everything is done to serve the Horde. The creatures have no families. They instead devote their lives to society. On the spaceship, Thig takes over Terry’s body and gains all of his knowledge. He then undergoes surgery to correct the scars that Terry sustained during the attack. When he exits the spaceship, Thig is surprised to learn that he now holds all of Terry’s childhood memories and understandings about the world around him. He approaches Terry’s home and is greeted by his children and his wife. Thig feels pleasure from this interaction, something he has never experienced before. When Ellen talks to Thig, he naturally responds like Terry would without even thinking about it. The family heads out on a vacation in the West. After several weeks, Thig’s family arrives back at home. He loved building relationships with his wife and children, and soon he will need to talk to his fellow Orthans and let them know that Earth is a perfect place for them to take over. He worries about what will become of Terry’s family. Thig enjoys being an Earthman because he is allowed to feel and express emotions and experience the uncertainty of life that does not exist on Ortha. When Thig leaves the house to go to the spaceship, his mind keeps coming up with ideas for new Western novels. He can’t help it since he still has many of Terry’s old thoughts. Torp decides it’s time to head back to Ortha. He will recommend killing all humans. Thig disagrees, and Torp becomes angry. He assumes that Thig has contracted a disease, and he tells Kam to test him. The ship blasts off, and in a fit of rage, Thig chokes Kam. They wrestle over Kam’s weapon, and Thig makes Kam shoot himself in the torso. Torp comes into the room and hits Thig over the head with a gun. Torp leaves Thig bleeding and alone in the laboratory. When he wakes up, he is injured, but he manages to grab a weapon. When Torp comes back in the room, he begins shrieking. Thig shoots the commander. Thig finds Torp’s note that says that Earth holds some disease that causes insanity, and therefore it is not appropriate for colonization. He sets the spaceship for Ortha and takes an auxiliary ship back to Earth. Happiness overtakes him as he heads back to his new home. He has zero regrets about leaving Ortha forever. Thig now believes in God, and realizes that his duty is to take care of Terry’s family for the rest of his life. He thinks up a Western plot about a cowboy who visits another planet.

62198

QUEST OF THIG By BASIL WELLS Thig of Ortha was the vanguard of the conquering "HORDE." He had blasted across trackless space to subdue a defenseless world—only to meet on Earth emotions that were more deadly than weapons. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Thig carefully smoothed the dark sand and seaweed of the lonely beach over the metal lid of the flexible ringed tunnel that linked the grubby ship from another planet with the upper air. He looked out across the heaving waters of the Sound toward Connecticut. He stared appraisingly around at the luxuriant green growth of foliage further inland; and started toward the little stretch of trees and brush, walking carefully because of the lesser gravitation. Thig was shorter than the average Earthman—although on Ortha he was well above the average in height—but his body was thick and powerfully muscled. His skull was well-shaped and large; his features were regular, perhaps a trifle oversize, and his hair and eyes were a curiously matching blend of reddish brown. Oddest of all, he wore no garments, other than the necessary belt and straps to support his rod-like weapon of white metal and his pouches for food and specimens. The Orthan entered the narrow strip of trees and crossed to the little-used highway on the other side. Here he patiently sat down to wait for an Earthman or an Earthwoman to pass. His task now was to bring a native, intact if possible, back to the carefully buried space cruiser where his two fellows and himself would drain the creature's mentality of all its knowledge. In this way they could learn whether a planet was suited for colonization by later swarms of Orthans. Already they had charted over a hundred celestial bodies but of them all only three had proven worthy of consideration. This latest planet, however, 72-P-3 on the chart, appeared to be an ideal world in every respect. Sunlight, plenty of water and a dense atmospheric envelope made of 72-P-3 a paradise among planets. The explorer from another world crouched into the concealment of a leafy shrub. A creature was approaching. Its squat body was covered with baggy strips of bluish cloth and it carried a jointed rod of metal and wood in its paw. It walked upright as did the men of Ortha. Thig's cold eyes opened a trifle wider as he stared into the thing's stupid face. It was as though he was looking into a bit of polished metal at the reflection of himself! The Earthman was opposite now and he must waste no more precious time. The mighty muscles of the Orthan sent him hurtling across the intervening space in two prodigious bounds, and his hands clamped across the mouth and neck of the stranger.... Lewis Terry was going fishing. For a week the typewriter mill that had ground out a thousand assorted yarns of the untamed West and the frigid desolation of the Northwoods had been silent. Lewis wondered if he was going stale. He had sat every day for eight hours in front of that shiny-buttoned bane of the typist, but there were no results. Feebly he had punched a key two days ago and a $ sign had appeared. He hadn't dared touch the machine since. For Mr. Terry, that hard-hitting writer of two-gun action, had never been further west of Long Island than Elizabeth, and he had promised his wife, Ellen, that he would take the three children and herself on a trailer tour of the West that very summer. Since that promise, he could not write a word. Visions of whooping red-skinned Apaches and be-chapped outlaws raiding his little trailer home kept rolling up out of his subconscious. Yet he had to write at least three novelets and a fistful of short stories in the next two weeks to finance the great adventure—or the trip was off. So Lewis left the weathered old cottage in the early dawn and headed for his tubby old boat at the landing in an attempt to work out a salable yarn.... "Hey!" he shouted as a naked man sprang out of the bushes beside the road. "What's the trouble?" Then he had no time for further speech, the massive arms of the stranger had wound around him and two hamlike hands shut off his speech and his wind. He fought futilely against trained muscles. The hand clamping his throat relaxed for a moment and hacked along the side of his head. Blackness flooded the brain of Lewis, and he knew no more. "There it is," announced Thig, dropping the limp body of the captured Earthman to the metal deck-plates. "It is a male of the species that must have built the cities we saw as we landed." "He resembles Thig," announced Kam. "But for the strange covering he wears he might be Thig." "Thig will be this creature!" announced Torp. "With a psychic relay we will transfer the Earthman's memories and meager store of knowledge to the brain of Thig! He can then go out and scout this world without arousing suspicion. While he is gone, I will take Kam and explore the two inner planets." "You are the commander," said Thig. "But I wish this beast did not wear these clumsy sheathing upon his body. On Ortha we do not hamper the use of our limbs so." "Do not question the word of your commander," growled Torp, swelling out his thick chest menacingly. "It is for the good of our people that you disguise yourself as an Earthman." "For the good of the Horde," Thig intoned almost piously as he lifted Terry's body and headed for the laboratory. Service for the Horde was all that the men of Ortha knew. Carefully cultured and brought to life in the laboratories of their Horde, they knew neither father nor mother. Affection and love were entirely lacking in their early training and later life. They were trained antlike from childhood that only the growth and power of the Horde were of any moment. Men and women alike toiled and died like unfeeling robots of flesh and bone for the Horde. The Horde was their religion, their love-life, their everything! So it was that the bodies of the Earthman and the Orthan were strapped on two parallel tables of chill metal and the twin helmets, linked to one another by the intricacies of the psychic relay, put upon their heads. For ten hours or more the droning hum of the relay sucked Terry's brain dry of knowledge. The shock upon the nervous system of the Earthman proved too violent and his heart faltered after a time and stopped completely. Twice, with subtle drugs they restored pseudo-life to his body and kept the electrical impulses throbbing from his tortured brain, but after the third suspension of life Thig removed his helmet. "There is nothing more to learn," he informed his impassive comrades. "Now, let us get on with the plastic surgery that is required. My new body must return to its barbaric household before undue attention is aroused. And when I return I will take along some of the gleaming baubles we found on the red planet—these people value them highly." An hour later, his scars and altered cartilage already healed and painless, Thig again scraped sand over the entrance to the space ship and set out along the moonlit beach toward the nearest path running inland to his home. Memory was laying the country bare about him, Terry's own childhood memories of this particular section of Long Island. Here was the place where Jake and Ted had helped him dig for the buried treasure that old 'Notch-ear' Beggs had told them so exactly about. Remembrance of that episode gave Thig an idea about the little lump of jewels in his pocket. He had found them in a chest along the beach! He was coming up on the porch now and at the sound of his foot on the sagging boards the screen door burst open and three little Earth-creatures were hugging at his legs. An odd sensation, that his acquired memories labeled as pleasure, sent a warm glow upward from around his heart. Then he saw the slender red-haired shape of a woman, the mate of the dead man he knew, and confusion struck his well-trained brain. Men had no mates on Ortha, sex had been overthrown with all the other primitive impulses of barbarism; so he was incapable of understanding the emotions that swept through his acquired memory. Unsteadily he took her in his arms and felt her warm lips pressed, trembling, against his own. That same hot wave of pulsing blood choked achingly up into his throat. "Lew, dear," Ellen was asking, "where have you been all day? I called up at the landing but you were not there. I wanted to let you know that Saddlebag Publications sent a check for $50 for "Reversed Revolvers" and three other editors asked for shorts soon." "Shoulda got a hundred bucks for that yarn," grunted Thig, and gasped. For the moment he had been Lewis Terry and not Thig! So thoroughly had he acquired the knowledge of Terry that he found himself unconsciously adopting the thinking and mannerism of the other. All the better this way, he realized—more natural. "Sorry I was late," he said, digging into his pocket for the glittering baubles, "but I was poking around on the beach where we used to hunt treasure and I found an old chest. Inside it I found nothing but a handful of these." He flashed the jewels in front of Ellen's startled eyes and she clung, unbelieving, to his arm. "Why, Lew," she gasped, "they're worth a fortune! We can buy that new trailer now and have a rebuilt motor in the car. We can go west right away.... Hollywood, the Grand Canyon, cowboys!" "Uh huh," agreed the pseudo Lewis, memories of the ferocious savages and gunmen of his stories rendering him acutely unhappy. Sincerely he hoped that the west had reformed. "I saved some kraut and weiners," Ellen said. "Get washed up while I'm warming them up. Kids ate all the bread so I had to borrow some from the Eskoes. Want coffee, too?" "Mmmmmm," came from the depths of the chipped white wash-basin. "Home again," whispered Ellen as she stood beside Thig twelve weeks later and gazed tearfully at the weathered little gray house. She knelt beside the front stoop and reached for the key hidden beneath it. "The west was wonderful; tremendous, vast and beautiful," she went on as they climbed the steps, "but nowhere was there any place as beautiful as our own little strip of sky and water." Thig sank into a dusty old swing that hung on creaking chains from the exposed rafters of the porch roof. He looked down at the dusty gray car and the bulbous silvery bulk of the trailer that had been their living quarters for almost three months. Strange thoughts were afloat in the chaos of his cool Orthan brain. Tonight or tomorrow night at the latest he must contact his two fellows and report that Earth was a planetary paradise. No other world, including Ortha, was so well-favored and rich. An expeditionary force to wipe the grotesque civilizations of Earth out of existence would, of course, be necessary before the first units of new Hordes could be landed. And there Thig balked. Why must they destroy these people, imperfect though their civilization might be, to make room for the Hordes? Thig tried to tell himself that it was the transmitted thoughts of the dead Earthman that made him feel so, but he was not too sure. For three months he had lived with people who loved, hated, wept and sacrificed for reasons that he had never known existed. He had learned the heady glory of thinking for himself and making his own decisions. He had experienced the primitive joy of matching his wits and tongue against the wits of other unpredictable human beings. There was no abrupt division of men and women into definite classes of endeavor. A laborer thought the same thoughts that a governor might think. Uncertainty added zest to every day's life. The Orthan had come to question the sole devotion of the individual to the Horde to the exclusion of all other interests. What, he wondered, would one new world—or a hundred—populated by the Hordes add to the progress of humanity? For a hundred thousand years the Orthan civilization had remained static, its energies directed into certain well-defined channels. They were mindless bees maintaining their vast mechanical hives. There was that moment on the brink of the Grand Canyon when Ellen had caught his arm breathlessly at all the beauty spread away there beneath them. There were mornings in the desert when the sun painted in lurid red the peaks above the harsh black-and-whites of the sagebrush and cactus slopes. There was the little boy, his body burning with fever, who nestled trustingly against his tense man's body and slept—the son of Ellen and the man he had destroyed. Thig groaned. He was a weakling to let sentimentality so get the better of his judgment. He would go now to the space ship and urge them to blast off for Ortha. He sprang off the porch and strode away down the road toward the beach. The children ran to him; wanted to go along. He sent them away harshly but they smiled and waved their brown little hands. Ellen came to the door and called after him. "Hurry home, dear," she said. "I'll have a bite ready in about an hour." He dared not say anything, for his voice would have broken and she would have known something was wrong. She was a very wise sort of person when something was troubling him. He waved his stubby paw of a hand to show that he had heard, and blindly hurried toward the Sound. Oddly enough, as he hurried away along the narrow path through the autumn woods, his mind busied itself with a new epic of the west that lived no longer. He mentally titled it: "Rustlers' Riot" and blocked in the outlines of his plot. One section of his brain was that of the careless author of gunslinging yarns, a section that seemed to be sapping the life from his own brain. He knew that the story would never be written, but he toyed with the idea. So far had Thig the emotionless, robot-being from Ortha drifted from the unquestioning worship of the Horde! "You have done well," announced Torp when Thig had completed his report on the resources and temperatures of various sections of Terra. "We now have located three worlds fit for colonization and so we will return to Ortha at once. "I will recommend the conquest of this planet, 72-P-3 at once and the complete destruction of all biped life upon it. The mental aberrations of the barbaric natives might lead to endless complications if they were permitted to exist outside our ordered way of life. I imagine that three circuits of the planet about its primary should prove sufficient for the purposes of complete liquidation." "But why," asked Thig slowly, "could we not disarm all the natives and exile them on one of the less desirable continents, Antarctica for example or Siberia? They are primitive humans even as our race was once a race of primitives. It is not our duty to help to attain our own degree of knowledge and comfort?" "Only the good of the Horde matters!" shouted Torp angrily. "Shall a race of feeble-witted beasts, such as these Earthmen, stand in the way of a superior race? We want their world, and so we will take it. The Law of the Horde states that all the universe is ours for the taking." "Let us get back to Ortha at once, then," gritted out Thig savagely. "Never again do I wish to set foot upon the soil of this mad planet. There are forces at work upon Earth that we of Ortha have long forgotten." "Check the blood of Thig for disease, Kam," ordered Torp shortly. "His words are highly irrational. Some form of fever perhaps native to this world. While you examine him I will blast off for Ortha." Thig followed Kam into the tiny laboratory and found a seat beside the squat scientist's desk. His eyes roamed over the familiar instruments and gauges, each in its own precise position in the cases along the walls. His gaze lingered longest on the stubby black ugliness of a decomposition blaster in its rack close to the deck. A blast of the invisible radiations from that weapon's hot throat and flesh or vegetable fiber rotted into flaky ashes. The ship trembled beneath their feet; it tore free from the feeble clutch of the sand about it, and they were rocketing skyward. Thig's broad fingers bit deep into the unyielding metal of his chair. Suddenly he knew that he must go back to Earth, back to Ellen and the children of the man he had helped destroy. He loved Ellen, and nothing must stand between them! The Hordes of Ortha must find some other world, an empty world—this planet was not for them. "Turn back!" he cried wildly. "I must go back to Earth. There is a woman there, helpless and alone, who needs me! The Horde does not need this planet." Kam eyed him coldly and lifted a shining hypodermic syringe from its case. He approached Thig warily, aware that disease often made a maniac of the finest members of the Horde. "No human being is more important than the Horde," he stated baldly. "This woman of whom you speak is merely one unit of the millions we must eliminate for the good of the Horde." Then it was that Thig went berserk. His fists slashed into the thick jaw of the scientist and his fingers ripped at the hard cords overlying the Orthan's vital throat tubes. His fingers and thumb gouged deep into Kam's startled throat and choked off any cry for assistance before it could be uttered. Kam's hand swept down to the holster swung from his intricate harness and dragged his blaster from it. Thig's other hand clamped over his and for long moments they swayed there, locked together in silent deadly struggle. The fate of a world hung in the balance as Kam's other hand fought against that lone arm of Thig. The scales swung in favor of Kam. Slowly the flaring snout of his weapon tilted upward until it reached the level of Thig's waist. Thig suddenly released his grip and dragged his enemy toward him. A sudden reversal of pressure on Kam's gun hand sent the weapon swivelling about full upon its owner's thick torso. Thig's fingers pressed down upon Kam's button finger, down upon the stud set into the grip of the decomposition blaster, and Kam's muscles turned to water. He shrieked. Before Thig's eyes half of his comrade's body sloughed away into foul corruption that swiftly gave way to hardened blobs of dessicated matter. Horror for what he had done—that he had slain one of his own Horde—made his limbs move woodenly. All of his thoughts were dulled for the moment. Painfully slow, he turned his body around toward the control blister, turned around on leaden feet, to look full into the narrowed icy eyes of his commander. He saw the heavy barrel of the blaster slashing down against his skull but he could not swing a fraction of an inch out of the way. His body seemed paralyzed. This was the end, he thought as he waited stupidly for the blow to fall, the end for Ellen and the kids and all the struggling races of Earth. He would never write another cowboy yarn—they would all be dead anyhow soon. Then a thunderclap exploded against his head and he dropped endlessly toward the deck. Blows rained against his skull. He wondered if Torp would ever cease to hammer at him and turn the deadly ray of the weapon upon him. Blood throbbed and pounded with every blow.... Bam, Bam, Bam, the blood pounded in his ears. Like repeated blows of a hammer they shook his booming head. No longer was Torp above him. He was in the corner of the laboratory, a crumpled blood-smeared heap of bruised flesh and bone. He was unfettered and the blood was caked upon his skull and in his matted hair. Torp must have thought he had killed him with those savage blows upon the head. Even Torp, thought Thig ruefully, gave way to the primitive rage of his ancestors at times; but to that very bit of unconscious atavism he now owed his life. A cool-headed robot of an Orthan would have efficiently used the blaster to destroy any possibility of remaining life in his unconscious body. Thig rolled slowly over so that his eye found the door into the control room. Torp would be coming back again to dispose of their bodies through the refuse lock. Already the body of Kam was gone. He wondered why he had been left until last. Perhaps Torp wished to take cultures of his blood and tissues to determine whether a disease was responsible for his sudden madness. The cases of fragile instruments were just above his head. Association of memories brought him the flash of the heavy blaster in its rack beneath them. His hand went up and felt the welcome hardness of the weapon. He tugged it free. In a moment he was on his knees crawling across the plates of the deck toward the door. Halfway across the floor he collapsed on his face, the metal of the gun making a harsh clang. He heard the feet of Torp scuffle out of silence and a choked cry in the man's throat squalled out into a senseless whinny. Thig raised himself up on a quivering elbow and slid the black length of the blaster in front of him. His eyes sought the doorway and stared full into the glaring vacant orbs of his commander. Torp leaned there watching him, his breath gurgling brokenly through his deep-bitten lips. The clawing marks of nails, fingernails, furrowed his face and chest. He was a madman! The deadly attack of Thig; his own violent avenging of Kam's death, and now the apparent return of the man he had killed come to life had all served to jolt his rigidly trained brain from its accustomed groove. The shock had been too much for the established thought-processes of the Orthan. So Thig shot him where he stood, mercifully, before that vacant mad stare set him, too, to gibbering and shrieking. Then he stepped over the skeleton-thing that had been Torp, using the new strength that victory had given him to drive him along. He had saved a world's civilization from extinction! The thought sobered him; yet, somehow, he was pleased that he had done so. After all, it had been the Earthwoman and the children he had been thinking of while he battled Kam, a selfish desire to protect them all. He went to the desk where Torp had been writing in the ship's log and read the last few nervously scrawled lines: Planet 72-P-3 unfit for colonization. Some pernicious disease that strikes at the brain centers and causes violent insanity is existent there. Thig, just returned from a survey of the planet, went mad and destroyed Kam. In turn I was forced to slay him. But it is not ended. Already I feel the insidious virus of.... And there his writing ended abruptly. Thig nodded. That would do it. He set the automatic pilot for the planet Ortha. Unless a rogue asteroid or a comet crossed the ship's path she would return safely to Ortha with that mute warning of danger on 72-P-3. The body of Torp would help to confirm his final message. Then Thig crossed the cabin to the auxiliary life boat there, one of a half-dozen space ships in miniature nested within the great ship's hull, and cut free from the mother vessel. He flipped the drive lever, felt the thrumming of the rockets driving him from the parent ship. The sensation of free flight against his new body was strangely exhilerating and heady. It was the newest of the emotions he had experienced on Earth since that day, so many months before, when he had felt the warmness of Ellen's lips tight against his. Thig flipped the drive lever, felt the thrumming of the rockets driving him from the parent ship. He swung about to the port, watched the flaming drive-rockets of the great exploratory ship hurl it toward far-away Ortha, and there was no regret in his mind that he was not returning to the planet of his first existence. He thought of the dull greys and blacks of his planet, of the monotonous routine of existence that had once been his—and his heart thrilled to the memories of the starry nights and perfect exciting days he had spent on his three month trip over Earth. He made a brief salute to the existence he had known, turned with a tiny sigh, and his fingers made brief adjustments in the controls. The rocket-thrum deepened, and the thin whistle of tenuous air clutching the ship echoed through the hull-plates. He thought of many things in those few moments. He watched the roundness of Earth flatten out, then take on the cup-like illusion that all planets had for an incoming ship. He reduced the drive of his rockets to a mere whisper, striving to control the impatience that crowded his mind. He shivered suddenly, remembering his utter callousness the first time he had sent a space ship whipping down toward the hills and valleys below. And there was a sickness within him when he fully realized that, despite his acquired memory and traits, he was an alien from outer space. He fingered the tiny scars that had completely obliterated the slight differences in his appearance from an Earthman's, and his fingers trembled a bit, as he bent and stared through the vision port. He said a brief prayer in his heart to a God whose presence he now felt very deeply. There were tears in the depths of his eyes, then, and memories were hot, bitter pains. Earth was not far below him. As he let gravity suck him earthward, he heaved a gasp of relief. He was no longer Thig, a creature of a Horde's creation, but Lewis Terry, writer of lurid gun-smoking tales of the West. He must remember that always. He had destroyed the real Terry and now, for the rest of his life, he must make up to the dead man's family. The knowledge that Ellen's love was not really meant for him would be a knife twisting in his heart but for her sake he must endure it. Her dreams and happiness must never be shattered. The bulge of Earth was flattening out now and he could see the outlines of Long Island in the growing twilight. A new plot was growing in the brain of Lewis Terry, a yarn about a cowboy suddenly transported to another world. He smiled ironically. He had seen those other worlds. Perhaps some day he would write about them.... He was Lewis Terry! He must remember that!

What is the plot of the story?

2

Thig and two other Orthans, Torp and Kam, are traveling the galaxy looking for another planet that the Orthans can populate. When they reach Earth, Thig goes out to look for a human specimen that he can capture and take back to the space cruiser to drain the person’s memory and knowledge to help them determine whether Earth will be a suitable planet for Orthan colonization. Thig captures Lewis Terry, a fiction writer with writer’s block and taking the day off to go fishing. Terry bears an uncanny likeness to Thig, and Torp decides to transfer Terry’s knowledge to Thig and have Thig explore Earth to determine whether it will be appropriate for the Orthans. They make the transfer, but Terry dies. They perform plastic surgery to make Thig look even more like Terry; then Thig returns to Terry’s home. Terry’s children and wife greet him, and Thig realizes he has a warm response to them even though Orthans have no emotions or sentimentality. When Terry’s wife, Ellen, tells him he received a check for $50 for one of her stories, Thig immediately comments that the story was worth $100—and is stunned to realize he is thinking like Terry, not himself. He shows Ellen the stones he dug up from an old wooden box that he remembered learning about in Terry’s childhood, and she exclaims they are worth a fortune and will finance a travel trailer and their trip out West. After returning from their western trip, Thig realizes he needs to report back to Torp about whether Earth is an appropriate planet for the Orthans. He knows it is perfect and that the Orthans will destroy every Earth person, and he begins to wonder why they would have to destroy them. As he makes his way to the space cruiser, he comes up with a new Western story to write. When Thig makes his report to Torp, Torp agrees that Earth is perfect for the Orthans and grows angry when Thig asks if they couldn’t just disarm the Earth people rather than destroying all of them. Torp orders Kam to check Thig’s blood for disease. The space cruiser blasts off, and Thig thinks about Ellen and her children with Lewis Terry and realizes he loves them and must protect them. He tells Torp and Kam to turn back—that there is a woman who needs him and the Horde from Ortha doesn’t need Earth. Thig fights and kills Kam, but Torp realizes what is happening and catches Thig off-guard. Torp beats Thig almost to death, and when Thig regains consciousness, he kills Torp and returns to Earth via a lifeboat. Thig decides that he must be Lewis Terry, not Thig, from now on, and he begins to develop another story about the old West.

62198

QUEST OF THIG By BASIL WELLS Thig of Ortha was the vanguard of the conquering "HORDE." He had blasted across trackless space to subdue a defenseless world—only to meet on Earth emotions that were more deadly than weapons. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Thig carefully smoothed the dark sand and seaweed of the lonely beach over the metal lid of the flexible ringed tunnel that linked the grubby ship from another planet with the upper air. He looked out across the heaving waters of the Sound toward Connecticut. He stared appraisingly around at the luxuriant green growth of foliage further inland; and started toward the little stretch of trees and brush, walking carefully because of the lesser gravitation. Thig was shorter than the average Earthman—although on Ortha he was well above the average in height—but his body was thick and powerfully muscled. His skull was well-shaped and large; his features were regular, perhaps a trifle oversize, and his hair and eyes were a curiously matching blend of reddish brown. Oddest of all, he wore no garments, other than the necessary belt and straps to support his rod-like weapon of white metal and his pouches for food and specimens. The Orthan entered the narrow strip of trees and crossed to the little-used highway on the other side. Here he patiently sat down to wait for an Earthman or an Earthwoman to pass. His task now was to bring a native, intact if possible, back to the carefully buried space cruiser where his two fellows and himself would drain the creature's mentality of all its knowledge. In this way they could learn whether a planet was suited for colonization by later swarms of Orthans. Already they had charted over a hundred celestial bodies but of them all only three had proven worthy of consideration. This latest planet, however, 72-P-3 on the chart, appeared to be an ideal world in every respect. Sunlight, plenty of water and a dense atmospheric envelope made of 72-P-3 a paradise among planets. The explorer from another world crouched into the concealment of a leafy shrub. A creature was approaching. Its squat body was covered with baggy strips of bluish cloth and it carried a jointed rod of metal and wood in its paw. It walked upright as did the men of Ortha. Thig's cold eyes opened a trifle wider as he stared into the thing's stupid face. It was as though he was looking into a bit of polished metal at the reflection of himself! The Earthman was opposite now and he must waste no more precious time. The mighty muscles of the Orthan sent him hurtling across the intervening space in two prodigious bounds, and his hands clamped across the mouth and neck of the stranger.... Lewis Terry was going fishing. For a week the typewriter mill that had ground out a thousand assorted yarns of the untamed West and the frigid desolation of the Northwoods had been silent. Lewis wondered if he was going stale. He had sat every day for eight hours in front of that shiny-buttoned bane of the typist, but there were no results. Feebly he had punched a key two days ago and a $ sign had appeared. He hadn't dared touch the machine since. For Mr. Terry, that hard-hitting writer of two-gun action, had never been further west of Long Island than Elizabeth, and he had promised his wife, Ellen, that he would take the three children and herself on a trailer tour of the West that very summer. Since that promise, he could not write a word. Visions of whooping red-skinned Apaches and be-chapped outlaws raiding his little trailer home kept rolling up out of his subconscious. Yet he had to write at least three novelets and a fistful of short stories in the next two weeks to finance the great adventure—or the trip was off. So Lewis left the weathered old cottage in the early dawn and headed for his tubby old boat at the landing in an attempt to work out a salable yarn.... "Hey!" he shouted as a naked man sprang out of the bushes beside the road. "What's the trouble?" Then he had no time for further speech, the massive arms of the stranger had wound around him and two hamlike hands shut off his speech and his wind. He fought futilely against trained muscles. The hand clamping his throat relaxed for a moment and hacked along the side of his head. Blackness flooded the brain of Lewis, and he knew no more. "There it is," announced Thig, dropping the limp body of the captured Earthman to the metal deck-plates. "It is a male of the species that must have built the cities we saw as we landed." "He resembles Thig," announced Kam. "But for the strange covering he wears he might be Thig." "Thig will be this creature!" announced Torp. "With a psychic relay we will transfer the Earthman's memories and meager store of knowledge to the brain of Thig! He can then go out and scout this world without arousing suspicion. While he is gone, I will take Kam and explore the two inner planets." "You are the commander," said Thig. "But I wish this beast did not wear these clumsy sheathing upon his body. On Ortha we do not hamper the use of our limbs so." "Do not question the word of your commander," growled Torp, swelling out his thick chest menacingly. "It is for the good of our people that you disguise yourself as an Earthman." "For the good of the Horde," Thig intoned almost piously as he lifted Terry's body and headed for the laboratory. Service for the Horde was all that the men of Ortha knew. Carefully cultured and brought to life in the laboratories of their Horde, they knew neither father nor mother. Affection and love were entirely lacking in their early training and later life. They were trained antlike from childhood that only the growth and power of the Horde were of any moment. Men and women alike toiled and died like unfeeling robots of flesh and bone for the Horde. The Horde was their religion, their love-life, their everything! So it was that the bodies of the Earthman and the Orthan were strapped on two parallel tables of chill metal and the twin helmets, linked to one another by the intricacies of the psychic relay, put upon their heads. For ten hours or more the droning hum of the relay sucked Terry's brain dry of knowledge. The shock upon the nervous system of the Earthman proved too violent and his heart faltered after a time and stopped completely. Twice, with subtle drugs they restored pseudo-life to his body and kept the electrical impulses throbbing from his tortured brain, but after the third suspension of life Thig removed his helmet. "There is nothing more to learn," he informed his impassive comrades. "Now, let us get on with the plastic surgery that is required. My new body must return to its barbaric household before undue attention is aroused. And when I return I will take along some of the gleaming baubles we found on the red planet—these people value them highly." An hour later, his scars and altered cartilage already healed and painless, Thig again scraped sand over the entrance to the space ship and set out along the moonlit beach toward the nearest path running inland to his home. Memory was laying the country bare about him, Terry's own childhood memories of this particular section of Long Island. Here was the place where Jake and Ted had helped him dig for the buried treasure that old 'Notch-ear' Beggs had told them so exactly about. Remembrance of that episode gave Thig an idea about the little lump of jewels in his pocket. He had found them in a chest along the beach! He was coming up on the porch now and at the sound of his foot on the sagging boards the screen door burst open and three little Earth-creatures were hugging at his legs. An odd sensation, that his acquired memories labeled as pleasure, sent a warm glow upward from around his heart. Then he saw the slender red-haired shape of a woman, the mate of the dead man he knew, and confusion struck his well-trained brain. Men had no mates on Ortha, sex had been overthrown with all the other primitive impulses of barbarism; so he was incapable of understanding the emotions that swept through his acquired memory. Unsteadily he took her in his arms and felt her warm lips pressed, trembling, against his own. That same hot wave of pulsing blood choked achingly up into his throat. "Lew, dear," Ellen was asking, "where have you been all day? I called up at the landing but you were not there. I wanted to let you know that Saddlebag Publications sent a check for $50 for "Reversed Revolvers" and three other editors asked for shorts soon." "Shoulda got a hundred bucks for that yarn," grunted Thig, and gasped. For the moment he had been Lewis Terry and not Thig! So thoroughly had he acquired the knowledge of Terry that he found himself unconsciously adopting the thinking and mannerism of the other. All the better this way, he realized—more natural. "Sorry I was late," he said, digging into his pocket for the glittering baubles, "but I was poking around on the beach where we used to hunt treasure and I found an old chest. Inside it I found nothing but a handful of these." He flashed the jewels in front of Ellen's startled eyes and she clung, unbelieving, to his arm. "Why, Lew," she gasped, "they're worth a fortune! We can buy that new trailer now and have a rebuilt motor in the car. We can go west right away.... Hollywood, the Grand Canyon, cowboys!" "Uh huh," agreed the pseudo Lewis, memories of the ferocious savages and gunmen of his stories rendering him acutely unhappy. Sincerely he hoped that the west had reformed. "I saved some kraut and weiners," Ellen said. "Get washed up while I'm warming them up. Kids ate all the bread so I had to borrow some from the Eskoes. Want coffee, too?" "Mmmmmm," came from the depths of the chipped white wash-basin. "Home again," whispered Ellen as she stood beside Thig twelve weeks later and gazed tearfully at the weathered little gray house. She knelt beside the front stoop and reached for the key hidden beneath it. "The west was wonderful; tremendous, vast and beautiful," she went on as they climbed the steps, "but nowhere was there any place as beautiful as our own little strip of sky and water." Thig sank into a dusty old swing that hung on creaking chains from the exposed rafters of the porch roof. He looked down at the dusty gray car and the bulbous silvery bulk of the trailer that had been their living quarters for almost three months. Strange thoughts were afloat in the chaos of his cool Orthan brain. Tonight or tomorrow night at the latest he must contact his two fellows and report that Earth was a planetary paradise. No other world, including Ortha, was so well-favored and rich. An expeditionary force to wipe the grotesque civilizations of Earth out of existence would, of course, be necessary before the first units of new Hordes could be landed. And there Thig balked. Why must they destroy these people, imperfect though their civilization might be, to make room for the Hordes? Thig tried to tell himself that it was the transmitted thoughts of the dead Earthman that made him feel so, but he was not too sure. For three months he had lived with people who loved, hated, wept and sacrificed for reasons that he had never known existed. He had learned the heady glory of thinking for himself and making his own decisions. He had experienced the primitive joy of matching his wits and tongue against the wits of other unpredictable human beings. There was no abrupt division of men and women into definite classes of endeavor. A laborer thought the same thoughts that a governor might think. Uncertainty added zest to every day's life. The Orthan had come to question the sole devotion of the individual to the Horde to the exclusion of all other interests. What, he wondered, would one new world—or a hundred—populated by the Hordes add to the progress of humanity? For a hundred thousand years the Orthan civilization had remained static, its energies directed into certain well-defined channels. They were mindless bees maintaining their vast mechanical hives. There was that moment on the brink of the Grand Canyon when Ellen had caught his arm breathlessly at all the beauty spread away there beneath them. There were mornings in the desert when the sun painted in lurid red the peaks above the harsh black-and-whites of the sagebrush and cactus slopes. There was the little boy, his body burning with fever, who nestled trustingly against his tense man's body and slept—the son of Ellen and the man he had destroyed. Thig groaned. He was a weakling to let sentimentality so get the better of his judgment. He would go now to the space ship and urge them to blast off for Ortha. He sprang off the porch and strode away down the road toward the beach. The children ran to him; wanted to go along. He sent them away harshly but they smiled and waved their brown little hands. Ellen came to the door and called after him. "Hurry home, dear," she said. "I'll have a bite ready in about an hour." He dared not say anything, for his voice would have broken and she would have known something was wrong. She was a very wise sort of person when something was troubling him. He waved his stubby paw of a hand to show that he had heard, and blindly hurried toward the Sound. Oddly enough, as he hurried away along the narrow path through the autumn woods, his mind busied itself with a new epic of the west that lived no longer. He mentally titled it: "Rustlers' Riot" and blocked in the outlines of his plot. One section of his brain was that of the careless author of gunslinging yarns, a section that seemed to be sapping the life from his own brain. He knew that the story would never be written, but he toyed with the idea. So far had Thig the emotionless, robot-being from Ortha drifted from the unquestioning worship of the Horde! "You have done well," announced Torp when Thig had completed his report on the resources and temperatures of various sections of Terra. "We now have located three worlds fit for colonization and so we will return to Ortha at once. "I will recommend the conquest of this planet, 72-P-3 at once and the complete destruction of all biped life upon it. The mental aberrations of the barbaric natives might lead to endless complications if they were permitted to exist outside our ordered way of life. I imagine that three circuits of the planet about its primary should prove sufficient for the purposes of complete liquidation." "But why," asked Thig slowly, "could we not disarm all the natives and exile them on one of the less desirable continents, Antarctica for example or Siberia? They are primitive humans even as our race was once a race of primitives. It is not our duty to help to attain our own degree of knowledge and comfort?" "Only the good of the Horde matters!" shouted Torp angrily. "Shall a race of feeble-witted beasts, such as these Earthmen, stand in the way of a superior race? We want their world, and so we will take it. The Law of the Horde states that all the universe is ours for the taking." "Let us get back to Ortha at once, then," gritted out Thig savagely. "Never again do I wish to set foot upon the soil of this mad planet. There are forces at work upon Earth that we of Ortha have long forgotten." "Check the blood of Thig for disease, Kam," ordered Torp shortly. "His words are highly irrational. Some form of fever perhaps native to this world. While you examine him I will blast off for Ortha." Thig followed Kam into the tiny laboratory and found a seat beside the squat scientist's desk. His eyes roamed over the familiar instruments and gauges, each in its own precise position in the cases along the walls. His gaze lingered longest on the stubby black ugliness of a decomposition blaster in its rack close to the deck. A blast of the invisible radiations from that weapon's hot throat and flesh or vegetable fiber rotted into flaky ashes. The ship trembled beneath their feet; it tore free from the feeble clutch of the sand about it, and they were rocketing skyward. Thig's broad fingers bit deep into the unyielding metal of his chair. Suddenly he knew that he must go back to Earth, back to Ellen and the children of the man he had helped destroy. He loved Ellen, and nothing must stand between them! The Hordes of Ortha must find some other world, an empty world—this planet was not for them. "Turn back!" he cried wildly. "I must go back to Earth. There is a woman there, helpless and alone, who needs me! The Horde does not need this planet." Kam eyed him coldly and lifted a shining hypodermic syringe from its case. He approached Thig warily, aware that disease often made a maniac of the finest members of the Horde. "No human being is more important than the Horde," he stated baldly. "This woman of whom you speak is merely one unit of the millions we must eliminate for the good of the Horde." Then it was that Thig went berserk. His fists slashed into the thick jaw of the scientist and his fingers ripped at the hard cords overlying the Orthan's vital throat tubes. His fingers and thumb gouged deep into Kam's startled throat and choked off any cry for assistance before it could be uttered. Kam's hand swept down to the holster swung from his intricate harness and dragged his blaster from it. Thig's other hand clamped over his and for long moments they swayed there, locked together in silent deadly struggle. The fate of a world hung in the balance as Kam's other hand fought against that lone arm of Thig. The scales swung in favor of Kam. Slowly the flaring snout of his weapon tilted upward until it reached the level of Thig's waist. Thig suddenly released his grip and dragged his enemy toward him. A sudden reversal of pressure on Kam's gun hand sent the weapon swivelling about full upon its owner's thick torso. Thig's fingers pressed down upon Kam's button finger, down upon the stud set into the grip of the decomposition blaster, and Kam's muscles turned to water. He shrieked. Before Thig's eyes half of his comrade's body sloughed away into foul corruption that swiftly gave way to hardened blobs of dessicated matter. Horror for what he had done—that he had slain one of his own Horde—made his limbs move woodenly. All of his thoughts were dulled for the moment. Painfully slow, he turned his body around toward the control blister, turned around on leaden feet, to look full into the narrowed icy eyes of his commander. He saw the heavy barrel of the blaster slashing down against his skull but he could not swing a fraction of an inch out of the way. His body seemed paralyzed. This was the end, he thought as he waited stupidly for the blow to fall, the end for Ellen and the kids and all the struggling races of Earth. He would never write another cowboy yarn—they would all be dead anyhow soon. Then a thunderclap exploded against his head and he dropped endlessly toward the deck. Blows rained against his skull. He wondered if Torp would ever cease to hammer at him and turn the deadly ray of the weapon upon him. Blood throbbed and pounded with every blow.... Bam, Bam, Bam, the blood pounded in his ears. Like repeated blows of a hammer they shook his booming head. No longer was Torp above him. He was in the corner of the laboratory, a crumpled blood-smeared heap of bruised flesh and bone. He was unfettered and the blood was caked upon his skull and in his matted hair. Torp must have thought he had killed him with those savage blows upon the head. Even Torp, thought Thig ruefully, gave way to the primitive rage of his ancestors at times; but to that very bit of unconscious atavism he now owed his life. A cool-headed robot of an Orthan would have efficiently used the blaster to destroy any possibility of remaining life in his unconscious body. Thig rolled slowly over so that his eye found the door into the control room. Torp would be coming back again to dispose of their bodies through the refuse lock. Already the body of Kam was gone. He wondered why he had been left until last. Perhaps Torp wished to take cultures of his blood and tissues to determine whether a disease was responsible for his sudden madness. The cases of fragile instruments were just above his head. Association of memories brought him the flash of the heavy blaster in its rack beneath them. His hand went up and felt the welcome hardness of the weapon. He tugged it free. In a moment he was on his knees crawling across the plates of the deck toward the door. Halfway across the floor he collapsed on his face, the metal of the gun making a harsh clang. He heard the feet of Torp scuffle out of silence and a choked cry in the man's throat squalled out into a senseless whinny. Thig raised himself up on a quivering elbow and slid the black length of the blaster in front of him. His eyes sought the doorway and stared full into the glaring vacant orbs of his commander. Torp leaned there watching him, his breath gurgling brokenly through his deep-bitten lips. The clawing marks of nails, fingernails, furrowed his face and chest. He was a madman! The deadly attack of Thig; his own violent avenging of Kam's death, and now the apparent return of the man he had killed come to life had all served to jolt his rigidly trained brain from its accustomed groove. The shock had been too much for the established thought-processes of the Orthan. So Thig shot him where he stood, mercifully, before that vacant mad stare set him, too, to gibbering and shrieking. Then he stepped over the skeleton-thing that had been Torp, using the new strength that victory had given him to drive him along. He had saved a world's civilization from extinction! The thought sobered him; yet, somehow, he was pleased that he had done so. After all, it had been the Earthwoman and the children he had been thinking of while he battled Kam, a selfish desire to protect them all. He went to the desk where Torp had been writing in the ship's log and read the last few nervously scrawled lines: Planet 72-P-3 unfit for colonization. Some pernicious disease that strikes at the brain centers and causes violent insanity is existent there. Thig, just returned from a survey of the planet, went mad and destroyed Kam. In turn I was forced to slay him. But it is not ended. Already I feel the insidious virus of.... And there his writing ended abruptly. Thig nodded. That would do it. He set the automatic pilot for the planet Ortha. Unless a rogue asteroid or a comet crossed the ship's path she would return safely to Ortha with that mute warning of danger on 72-P-3. The body of Torp would help to confirm his final message. Then Thig crossed the cabin to the auxiliary life boat there, one of a half-dozen space ships in miniature nested within the great ship's hull, and cut free from the mother vessel. He flipped the drive lever, felt the thrumming of the rockets driving him from the parent ship. The sensation of free flight against his new body was strangely exhilerating and heady. It was the newest of the emotions he had experienced on Earth since that day, so many months before, when he had felt the warmness of Ellen's lips tight against his. Thig flipped the drive lever, felt the thrumming of the rockets driving him from the parent ship. He swung about to the port, watched the flaming drive-rockets of the great exploratory ship hurl it toward far-away Ortha, and there was no regret in his mind that he was not returning to the planet of his first existence. He thought of the dull greys and blacks of his planet, of the monotonous routine of existence that had once been his—and his heart thrilled to the memories of the starry nights and perfect exciting days he had spent on his three month trip over Earth. He made a brief salute to the existence he had known, turned with a tiny sigh, and his fingers made brief adjustments in the controls. The rocket-thrum deepened, and the thin whistle of tenuous air clutching the ship echoed through the hull-plates. He thought of many things in those few moments. He watched the roundness of Earth flatten out, then take on the cup-like illusion that all planets had for an incoming ship. He reduced the drive of his rockets to a mere whisper, striving to control the impatience that crowded his mind. He shivered suddenly, remembering his utter callousness the first time he had sent a space ship whipping down toward the hills and valleys below. And there was a sickness within him when he fully realized that, despite his acquired memory and traits, he was an alien from outer space. He fingered the tiny scars that had completely obliterated the slight differences in his appearance from an Earthman's, and his fingers trembled a bit, as he bent and stared through the vision port. He said a brief prayer in his heart to a God whose presence he now felt very deeply. There were tears in the depths of his eyes, then, and memories were hot, bitter pains. Earth was not far below him. As he let gravity suck him earthward, he heaved a gasp of relief. He was no longer Thig, a creature of a Horde's creation, but Lewis Terry, writer of lurid gun-smoking tales of the West. He must remember that always. He had destroyed the real Terry and now, for the rest of his life, he must make up to the dead man's family. The knowledge that Ellen's love was not really meant for him would be a knife twisting in his heart but for her sake he must endure it. Her dreams and happiness must never be shattered. The bulge of Earth was flattening out now and he could see the outlines of Long Island in the growing twilight. A new plot was growing in the brain of Lewis Terry, a yarn about a cowboy suddenly transported to another world. He smiled ironically. He had seen those other worlds. Perhaps some day he would write about them.... He was Lewis Terry! He must remember that!

Who is Thig and what happens to him throughout the story?

9

Thig is the protagonist of the story, a native of the planet Ortha. He is described as shorter than an average human man (though tall for an Orthan man), and thick-bodied with well-developed muscles, average-to-large facial features, and reddish brown eyes. At the beginning of the story, he and two other Orthans, Kam and Torp, are on a mission to find planets considered viable for the Orthans to take over. Thig kidnaps a human man, Lewis Terry, and the Orthans transfer his memories to Thig and surgically alter him to look like Terry. Thig assumes his identity and joins his family posing as Terry. He begins to feel new sensations and emotions around Terry’s wife, Ellen, and their kids, and travels with them on a three-month vacation during which he learns what it feels like to be human and to care for a family. When they return and he must make his report to the other Orthans, he truthfully reports that Earth would be ideal to take over but has second thoughts when Torp says he’ll recommend that they conquer Earth and decimate the population. When his pleas to consider just disarming and exiling the humans are met with scorn, Thig becomes angry and ultimately realizes that he loves Ellen and wants to go back to save Earth. He kills both of his Orthan colleagues and sends the ship back toward Ortha as he takes an auxiliary ship back to Long Island. Along the way, he experiences many emotions including regret for his former callousness and taking Lewis Terry away from his family. Instead of the robotic being who initially exhibited coldness and indifference at the beginning of the story, he now experiences remorse and selflessness as he decides to give Ellen and the kids the life they deserve even though he’ll always know who he is and what he has done.

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QUEST OF THIG By BASIL WELLS Thig of Ortha was the vanguard of the conquering "HORDE." He had blasted across trackless space to subdue a defenseless world—only to meet on Earth emotions that were more deadly than weapons. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Thig carefully smoothed the dark sand and seaweed of the lonely beach over the metal lid of the flexible ringed tunnel that linked the grubby ship from another planet with the upper air. He looked out across the heaving waters of the Sound toward Connecticut. He stared appraisingly around at the luxuriant green growth of foliage further inland; and started toward the little stretch of trees and brush, walking carefully because of the lesser gravitation. Thig was shorter than the average Earthman—although on Ortha he was well above the average in height—but his body was thick and powerfully muscled. His skull was well-shaped and large; his features were regular, perhaps a trifle oversize, and his hair and eyes were a curiously matching blend of reddish brown. Oddest of all, he wore no garments, other than the necessary belt and straps to support his rod-like weapon of white metal and his pouches for food and specimens. The Orthan entered the narrow strip of trees and crossed to the little-used highway on the other side. Here he patiently sat down to wait for an Earthman or an Earthwoman to pass. His task now was to bring a native, intact if possible, back to the carefully buried space cruiser where his two fellows and himself would drain the creature's mentality of all its knowledge. In this way they could learn whether a planet was suited for colonization by later swarms of Orthans. Already they had charted over a hundred celestial bodies but of them all only three had proven worthy of consideration. This latest planet, however, 72-P-3 on the chart, appeared to be an ideal world in every respect. Sunlight, plenty of water and a dense atmospheric envelope made of 72-P-3 a paradise among planets. The explorer from another world crouched into the concealment of a leafy shrub. A creature was approaching. Its squat body was covered with baggy strips of bluish cloth and it carried a jointed rod of metal and wood in its paw. It walked upright as did the men of Ortha. Thig's cold eyes opened a trifle wider as he stared into the thing's stupid face. It was as though he was looking into a bit of polished metal at the reflection of himself! The Earthman was opposite now and he must waste no more precious time. The mighty muscles of the Orthan sent him hurtling across the intervening space in two prodigious bounds, and his hands clamped across the mouth and neck of the stranger.... Lewis Terry was going fishing. For a week the typewriter mill that had ground out a thousand assorted yarns of the untamed West and the frigid desolation of the Northwoods had been silent. Lewis wondered if he was going stale. He had sat every day for eight hours in front of that shiny-buttoned bane of the typist, but there were no results. Feebly he had punched a key two days ago and a $ sign had appeared. He hadn't dared touch the machine since. For Mr. Terry, that hard-hitting writer of two-gun action, had never been further west of Long Island than Elizabeth, and he had promised his wife, Ellen, that he would take the three children and herself on a trailer tour of the West that very summer. Since that promise, he could not write a word. Visions of whooping red-skinned Apaches and be-chapped outlaws raiding his little trailer home kept rolling up out of his subconscious. Yet he had to write at least three novelets and a fistful of short stories in the next two weeks to finance the great adventure—or the trip was off. So Lewis left the weathered old cottage in the early dawn and headed for his tubby old boat at the landing in an attempt to work out a salable yarn.... "Hey!" he shouted as a naked man sprang out of the bushes beside the road. "What's the trouble?" Then he had no time for further speech, the massive arms of the stranger had wound around him and two hamlike hands shut off his speech and his wind. He fought futilely against trained muscles. The hand clamping his throat relaxed for a moment and hacked along the side of his head. Blackness flooded the brain of Lewis, and he knew no more. "There it is," announced Thig, dropping the limp body of the captured Earthman to the metal deck-plates. "It is a male of the species that must have built the cities we saw as we landed." "He resembles Thig," announced Kam. "But for the strange covering he wears he might be Thig." "Thig will be this creature!" announced Torp. "With a psychic relay we will transfer the Earthman's memories and meager store of knowledge to the brain of Thig! He can then go out and scout this world without arousing suspicion. While he is gone, I will take Kam and explore the two inner planets." "You are the commander," said Thig. "But I wish this beast did not wear these clumsy sheathing upon his body. On Ortha we do not hamper the use of our limbs so." "Do not question the word of your commander," growled Torp, swelling out his thick chest menacingly. "It is for the good of our people that you disguise yourself as an Earthman." "For the good of the Horde," Thig intoned almost piously as he lifted Terry's body and headed for the laboratory. Service for the Horde was all that the men of Ortha knew. Carefully cultured and brought to life in the laboratories of their Horde, they knew neither father nor mother. Affection and love were entirely lacking in their early training and later life. They were trained antlike from childhood that only the growth and power of the Horde were of any moment. Men and women alike toiled and died like unfeeling robots of flesh and bone for the Horde. The Horde was their religion, their love-life, their everything! So it was that the bodies of the Earthman and the Orthan were strapped on two parallel tables of chill metal and the twin helmets, linked to one another by the intricacies of the psychic relay, put upon their heads. For ten hours or more the droning hum of the relay sucked Terry's brain dry of knowledge. The shock upon the nervous system of the Earthman proved too violent and his heart faltered after a time and stopped completely. Twice, with subtle drugs they restored pseudo-life to his body and kept the electrical impulses throbbing from his tortured brain, but after the third suspension of life Thig removed his helmet. "There is nothing more to learn," he informed his impassive comrades. "Now, let us get on with the plastic surgery that is required. My new body must return to its barbaric household before undue attention is aroused. And when I return I will take along some of the gleaming baubles we found on the red planet—these people value them highly." An hour later, his scars and altered cartilage already healed and painless, Thig again scraped sand over the entrance to the space ship and set out along the moonlit beach toward the nearest path running inland to his home. Memory was laying the country bare about him, Terry's own childhood memories of this particular section of Long Island. Here was the place where Jake and Ted had helped him dig for the buried treasure that old 'Notch-ear' Beggs had told them so exactly about. Remembrance of that episode gave Thig an idea about the little lump of jewels in his pocket. He had found them in a chest along the beach! He was coming up on the porch now and at the sound of his foot on the sagging boards the screen door burst open and three little Earth-creatures were hugging at his legs. An odd sensation, that his acquired memories labeled as pleasure, sent a warm glow upward from around his heart. Then he saw the slender red-haired shape of a woman, the mate of the dead man he knew, and confusion struck his well-trained brain. Men had no mates on Ortha, sex had been overthrown with all the other primitive impulses of barbarism; so he was incapable of understanding the emotions that swept through his acquired memory. Unsteadily he took her in his arms and felt her warm lips pressed, trembling, against his own. That same hot wave of pulsing blood choked achingly up into his throat. "Lew, dear," Ellen was asking, "where have you been all day? I called up at the landing but you were not there. I wanted to let you know that Saddlebag Publications sent a check for $50 for "Reversed Revolvers" and three other editors asked for shorts soon." "Shoulda got a hundred bucks for that yarn," grunted Thig, and gasped. For the moment he had been Lewis Terry and not Thig! So thoroughly had he acquired the knowledge of Terry that he found himself unconsciously adopting the thinking and mannerism of the other. All the better this way, he realized—more natural. "Sorry I was late," he said, digging into his pocket for the glittering baubles, "but I was poking around on the beach where we used to hunt treasure and I found an old chest. Inside it I found nothing but a handful of these." He flashed the jewels in front of Ellen's startled eyes and she clung, unbelieving, to his arm. "Why, Lew," she gasped, "they're worth a fortune! We can buy that new trailer now and have a rebuilt motor in the car. We can go west right away.... Hollywood, the Grand Canyon, cowboys!" "Uh huh," agreed the pseudo Lewis, memories of the ferocious savages and gunmen of his stories rendering him acutely unhappy. Sincerely he hoped that the west had reformed. "I saved some kraut and weiners," Ellen said. "Get washed up while I'm warming them up. Kids ate all the bread so I had to borrow some from the Eskoes. Want coffee, too?" "Mmmmmm," came from the depths of the chipped white wash-basin. "Home again," whispered Ellen as she stood beside Thig twelve weeks later and gazed tearfully at the weathered little gray house. She knelt beside the front stoop and reached for the key hidden beneath it. "The west was wonderful; tremendous, vast and beautiful," she went on as they climbed the steps, "but nowhere was there any place as beautiful as our own little strip of sky and water." Thig sank into a dusty old swing that hung on creaking chains from the exposed rafters of the porch roof. He looked down at the dusty gray car and the bulbous silvery bulk of the trailer that had been their living quarters for almost three months. Strange thoughts were afloat in the chaos of his cool Orthan brain. Tonight or tomorrow night at the latest he must contact his two fellows and report that Earth was a planetary paradise. No other world, including Ortha, was so well-favored and rich. An expeditionary force to wipe the grotesque civilizations of Earth out of existence would, of course, be necessary before the first units of new Hordes could be landed. And there Thig balked. Why must they destroy these people, imperfect though their civilization might be, to make room for the Hordes? Thig tried to tell himself that it was the transmitted thoughts of the dead Earthman that made him feel so, but he was not too sure. For three months he had lived with people who loved, hated, wept and sacrificed for reasons that he had never known existed. He had learned the heady glory of thinking for himself and making his own decisions. He had experienced the primitive joy of matching his wits and tongue against the wits of other unpredictable human beings. There was no abrupt division of men and women into definite classes of endeavor. A laborer thought the same thoughts that a governor might think. Uncertainty added zest to every day's life. The Orthan had come to question the sole devotion of the individual to the Horde to the exclusion of all other interests. What, he wondered, would one new world—or a hundred—populated by the Hordes add to the progress of humanity? For a hundred thousand years the Orthan civilization had remained static, its energies directed into certain well-defined channels. They were mindless bees maintaining their vast mechanical hives. There was that moment on the brink of the Grand Canyon when Ellen had caught his arm breathlessly at all the beauty spread away there beneath them. There were mornings in the desert when the sun painted in lurid red the peaks above the harsh black-and-whites of the sagebrush and cactus slopes. There was the little boy, his body burning with fever, who nestled trustingly against his tense man's body and slept—the son of Ellen and the man he had destroyed. Thig groaned. He was a weakling to let sentimentality so get the better of his judgment. He would go now to the space ship and urge them to blast off for Ortha. He sprang off the porch and strode away down the road toward the beach. The children ran to him; wanted to go along. He sent them away harshly but they smiled and waved their brown little hands. Ellen came to the door and called after him. "Hurry home, dear," she said. "I'll have a bite ready in about an hour." He dared not say anything, for his voice would have broken and she would have known something was wrong. She was a very wise sort of person when something was troubling him. He waved his stubby paw of a hand to show that he had heard, and blindly hurried toward the Sound. Oddly enough, as he hurried away along the narrow path through the autumn woods, his mind busied itself with a new epic of the west that lived no longer. He mentally titled it: "Rustlers' Riot" and blocked in the outlines of his plot. One section of his brain was that of the careless author of gunslinging yarns, a section that seemed to be sapping the life from his own brain. He knew that the story would never be written, but he toyed with the idea. So far had Thig the emotionless, robot-being from Ortha drifted from the unquestioning worship of the Horde! "You have done well," announced Torp when Thig had completed his report on the resources and temperatures of various sections of Terra. "We now have located three worlds fit for colonization and so we will return to Ortha at once. "I will recommend the conquest of this planet, 72-P-3 at once and the complete destruction of all biped life upon it. The mental aberrations of the barbaric natives might lead to endless complications if they were permitted to exist outside our ordered way of life. I imagine that three circuits of the planet about its primary should prove sufficient for the purposes of complete liquidation." "But why," asked Thig slowly, "could we not disarm all the natives and exile them on one of the less desirable continents, Antarctica for example or Siberia? They are primitive humans even as our race was once a race of primitives. It is not our duty to help to attain our own degree of knowledge and comfort?" "Only the good of the Horde matters!" shouted Torp angrily. "Shall a race of feeble-witted beasts, such as these Earthmen, stand in the way of a superior race? We want their world, and so we will take it. The Law of the Horde states that all the universe is ours for the taking." "Let us get back to Ortha at once, then," gritted out Thig savagely. "Never again do I wish to set foot upon the soil of this mad planet. There are forces at work upon Earth that we of Ortha have long forgotten." "Check the blood of Thig for disease, Kam," ordered Torp shortly. "His words are highly irrational. Some form of fever perhaps native to this world. While you examine him I will blast off for Ortha." Thig followed Kam into the tiny laboratory and found a seat beside the squat scientist's desk. His eyes roamed over the familiar instruments and gauges, each in its own precise position in the cases along the walls. His gaze lingered longest on the stubby black ugliness of a decomposition blaster in its rack close to the deck. A blast of the invisible radiations from that weapon's hot throat and flesh or vegetable fiber rotted into flaky ashes. The ship trembled beneath their feet; it tore free from the feeble clutch of the sand about it, and they were rocketing skyward. Thig's broad fingers bit deep into the unyielding metal of his chair. Suddenly he knew that he must go back to Earth, back to Ellen and the children of the man he had helped destroy. He loved Ellen, and nothing must stand between them! The Hordes of Ortha must find some other world, an empty world—this planet was not for them. "Turn back!" he cried wildly. "I must go back to Earth. There is a woman there, helpless and alone, who needs me! The Horde does not need this planet." Kam eyed him coldly and lifted a shining hypodermic syringe from its case. He approached Thig warily, aware that disease often made a maniac of the finest members of the Horde. "No human being is more important than the Horde," he stated baldly. "This woman of whom you speak is merely one unit of the millions we must eliminate for the good of the Horde." Then it was that Thig went berserk. His fists slashed into the thick jaw of the scientist and his fingers ripped at the hard cords overlying the Orthan's vital throat tubes. His fingers and thumb gouged deep into Kam's startled throat and choked off any cry for assistance before it could be uttered. Kam's hand swept down to the holster swung from his intricate harness and dragged his blaster from it. Thig's other hand clamped over his and for long moments they swayed there, locked together in silent deadly struggle. The fate of a world hung in the balance as Kam's other hand fought against that lone arm of Thig. The scales swung in favor of Kam. Slowly the flaring snout of his weapon tilted upward until it reached the level of Thig's waist. Thig suddenly released his grip and dragged his enemy toward him. A sudden reversal of pressure on Kam's gun hand sent the weapon swivelling about full upon its owner's thick torso. Thig's fingers pressed down upon Kam's button finger, down upon the stud set into the grip of the decomposition blaster, and Kam's muscles turned to water. He shrieked. Before Thig's eyes half of his comrade's body sloughed away into foul corruption that swiftly gave way to hardened blobs of dessicated matter. Horror for what he had done—that he had slain one of his own Horde—made his limbs move woodenly. All of his thoughts were dulled for the moment. Painfully slow, he turned his body around toward the control blister, turned around on leaden feet, to look full into the narrowed icy eyes of his commander. He saw the heavy barrel of the blaster slashing down against his skull but he could not swing a fraction of an inch out of the way. His body seemed paralyzed. This was the end, he thought as he waited stupidly for the blow to fall, the end for Ellen and the kids and all the struggling races of Earth. He would never write another cowboy yarn—they would all be dead anyhow soon. Then a thunderclap exploded against his head and he dropped endlessly toward the deck. Blows rained against his skull. He wondered if Torp would ever cease to hammer at him and turn the deadly ray of the weapon upon him. Blood throbbed and pounded with every blow.... Bam, Bam, Bam, the blood pounded in his ears. Like repeated blows of a hammer they shook his booming head. No longer was Torp above him. He was in the corner of the laboratory, a crumpled blood-smeared heap of bruised flesh and bone. He was unfettered and the blood was caked upon his skull and in his matted hair. Torp must have thought he had killed him with those savage blows upon the head. Even Torp, thought Thig ruefully, gave way to the primitive rage of his ancestors at times; but to that very bit of unconscious atavism he now owed his life. A cool-headed robot of an Orthan would have efficiently used the blaster to destroy any possibility of remaining life in his unconscious body. Thig rolled slowly over so that his eye found the door into the control room. Torp would be coming back again to dispose of their bodies through the refuse lock. Already the body of Kam was gone. He wondered why he had been left until last. Perhaps Torp wished to take cultures of his blood and tissues to determine whether a disease was responsible for his sudden madness. The cases of fragile instruments were just above his head. Association of memories brought him the flash of the heavy blaster in its rack beneath them. His hand went up and felt the welcome hardness of the weapon. He tugged it free. In a moment he was on his knees crawling across the plates of the deck toward the door. Halfway across the floor he collapsed on his face, the metal of the gun making a harsh clang. He heard the feet of Torp scuffle out of silence and a choked cry in the man's throat squalled out into a senseless whinny. Thig raised himself up on a quivering elbow and slid the black length of the blaster in front of him. His eyes sought the doorway and stared full into the glaring vacant orbs of his commander. Torp leaned there watching him, his breath gurgling brokenly through his deep-bitten lips. The clawing marks of nails, fingernails, furrowed his face and chest. He was a madman! The deadly attack of Thig; his own violent avenging of Kam's death, and now the apparent return of the man he had killed come to life had all served to jolt his rigidly trained brain from its accustomed groove. The shock had been too much for the established thought-processes of the Orthan. So Thig shot him where he stood, mercifully, before that vacant mad stare set him, too, to gibbering and shrieking. Then he stepped over the skeleton-thing that had been Torp, using the new strength that victory had given him to drive him along. He had saved a world's civilization from extinction! The thought sobered him; yet, somehow, he was pleased that he had done so. After all, it had been the Earthwoman and the children he had been thinking of while he battled Kam, a selfish desire to protect them all. He went to the desk where Torp had been writing in the ship's log and read the last few nervously scrawled lines: Planet 72-P-3 unfit for colonization. Some pernicious disease that strikes at the brain centers and causes violent insanity is existent there. Thig, just returned from a survey of the planet, went mad and destroyed Kam. In turn I was forced to slay him. But it is not ended. Already I feel the insidious virus of.... And there his writing ended abruptly. Thig nodded. That would do it. He set the automatic pilot for the planet Ortha. Unless a rogue asteroid or a comet crossed the ship's path she would return safely to Ortha with that mute warning of danger on 72-P-3. The body of Torp would help to confirm his final message. Then Thig crossed the cabin to the auxiliary life boat there, one of a half-dozen space ships in miniature nested within the great ship's hull, and cut free from the mother vessel. He flipped the drive lever, felt the thrumming of the rockets driving him from the parent ship. The sensation of free flight against his new body was strangely exhilerating and heady. It was the newest of the emotions he had experienced on Earth since that day, so many months before, when he had felt the warmness of Ellen's lips tight against his. Thig flipped the drive lever, felt the thrumming of the rockets driving him from the parent ship. He swung about to the port, watched the flaming drive-rockets of the great exploratory ship hurl it toward far-away Ortha, and there was no regret in his mind that he was not returning to the planet of his first existence. He thought of the dull greys and blacks of his planet, of the monotonous routine of existence that had once been his—and his heart thrilled to the memories of the starry nights and perfect exciting days he had spent on his three month trip over Earth. He made a brief salute to the existence he had known, turned with a tiny sigh, and his fingers made brief adjustments in the controls. The rocket-thrum deepened, and the thin whistle of tenuous air clutching the ship echoed through the hull-plates. He thought of many things in those few moments. He watched the roundness of Earth flatten out, then take on the cup-like illusion that all planets had for an incoming ship. He reduced the drive of his rockets to a mere whisper, striving to control the impatience that crowded his mind. He shivered suddenly, remembering his utter callousness the first time he had sent a space ship whipping down toward the hills and valleys below. And there was a sickness within him when he fully realized that, despite his acquired memory and traits, he was an alien from outer space. He fingered the tiny scars that had completely obliterated the slight differences in his appearance from an Earthman's, and his fingers trembled a bit, as he bent and stared through the vision port. He said a brief prayer in his heart to a God whose presence he now felt very deeply. There were tears in the depths of his eyes, then, and memories were hot, bitter pains. Earth was not far below him. As he let gravity suck him earthward, he heaved a gasp of relief. He was no longer Thig, a creature of a Horde's creation, but Lewis Terry, writer of lurid gun-smoking tales of the West. He must remember that always. He had destroyed the real Terry and now, for the rest of his life, he must make up to the dead man's family. The knowledge that Ellen's love was not really meant for him would be a knife twisting in his heart but for her sake he must endure it. Her dreams and happiness must never be shattered. The bulge of Earth was flattening out now and he could see the outlines of Long Island in the growing twilight. A new plot was growing in the brain of Lewis Terry, a yarn about a cowboy suddenly transported to another world. He smiled ironically. He had seen those other worlds. Perhaps some day he would write about them.... He was Lewis Terry! He must remember that!

Who is Thig and what happens to him throughout the story?

8

Thig is an Orthan from the planet Ortha, who visits Earth on a research mission with fellow Horde members Kam and Torp. Thig looks very similar to his research victim, a Western fiction writer named Lewis Terry, except he is a bit shorter, has a thick, muscular body, and has unusual reddish-brown hair on his head that matches his eyebrow hair. He wears no clothes, except some straps and pockets used for carrying his weapons and food; he is disturbed by Lew’s human clothes, which he considers impractical. Thig captures Lew and Kam and Torp help him transfer his memories, thoughts, and human emotions to better disguise himself as he researches Earth’s suitability for Horde habitation. Throughout the story, Thig struggles with processing his newly-acquired human emotions as they conflict with the mind programming of the Horde, which tells him that all of life is to be lived exclusively for the benefit and maintenance of the Horde. Thig goes on a three-month excursion with Lew’s family, during which time he falls in love with Ellen and discovers the beauty of Earth. He tries to convince Kam and Torp to abandon their mission, and when they try to test Thig for disease, he kills them both and returns to Earth to spend his existence as Lewis Terry.

62198

QUEST OF THIG By BASIL WELLS Thig of Ortha was the vanguard of the conquering "HORDE." He had blasted across trackless space to subdue a defenseless world—only to meet on Earth emotions that were more deadly than weapons. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Thig carefully smoothed the dark sand and seaweed of the lonely beach over the metal lid of the flexible ringed tunnel that linked the grubby ship from another planet with the upper air. He looked out across the heaving waters of the Sound toward Connecticut. He stared appraisingly around at the luxuriant green growth of foliage further inland; and started toward the little stretch of trees and brush, walking carefully because of the lesser gravitation. Thig was shorter than the average Earthman—although on Ortha he was well above the average in height—but his body was thick and powerfully muscled. His skull was well-shaped and large; his features were regular, perhaps a trifle oversize, and his hair and eyes were a curiously matching blend of reddish brown. Oddest of all, he wore no garments, other than the necessary belt and straps to support his rod-like weapon of white metal and his pouches for food and specimens. The Orthan entered the narrow strip of trees and crossed to the little-used highway on the other side. Here he patiently sat down to wait for an Earthman or an Earthwoman to pass. His task now was to bring a native, intact if possible, back to the carefully buried space cruiser where his two fellows and himself would drain the creature's mentality of all its knowledge. In this way they could learn whether a planet was suited for colonization by later swarms of Orthans. Already they had charted over a hundred celestial bodies but of them all only three had proven worthy of consideration. This latest planet, however, 72-P-3 on the chart, appeared to be an ideal world in every respect. Sunlight, plenty of water and a dense atmospheric envelope made of 72-P-3 a paradise among planets. The explorer from another world crouched into the concealment of a leafy shrub. A creature was approaching. Its squat body was covered with baggy strips of bluish cloth and it carried a jointed rod of metal and wood in its paw. It walked upright as did the men of Ortha. Thig's cold eyes opened a trifle wider as he stared into the thing's stupid face. It was as though he was looking into a bit of polished metal at the reflection of himself! The Earthman was opposite now and he must waste no more precious time. The mighty muscles of the Orthan sent him hurtling across the intervening space in two prodigious bounds, and his hands clamped across the mouth and neck of the stranger.... Lewis Terry was going fishing. For a week the typewriter mill that had ground out a thousand assorted yarns of the untamed West and the frigid desolation of the Northwoods had been silent. Lewis wondered if he was going stale. He had sat every day for eight hours in front of that shiny-buttoned bane of the typist, but there were no results. Feebly he had punched a key two days ago and a $ sign had appeared. He hadn't dared touch the machine since. For Mr. Terry, that hard-hitting writer of two-gun action, had never been further west of Long Island than Elizabeth, and he had promised his wife, Ellen, that he would take the three children and herself on a trailer tour of the West that very summer. Since that promise, he could not write a word. Visions of whooping red-skinned Apaches and be-chapped outlaws raiding his little trailer home kept rolling up out of his subconscious. Yet he had to write at least three novelets and a fistful of short stories in the next two weeks to finance the great adventure—or the trip was off. So Lewis left the weathered old cottage in the early dawn and headed for his tubby old boat at the landing in an attempt to work out a salable yarn.... "Hey!" he shouted as a naked man sprang out of the bushes beside the road. "What's the trouble?" Then he had no time for further speech, the massive arms of the stranger had wound around him and two hamlike hands shut off his speech and his wind. He fought futilely against trained muscles. The hand clamping his throat relaxed for a moment and hacked along the side of his head. Blackness flooded the brain of Lewis, and he knew no more. "There it is," announced Thig, dropping the limp body of the captured Earthman to the metal deck-plates. "It is a male of the species that must have built the cities we saw as we landed." "He resembles Thig," announced Kam. "But for the strange covering he wears he might be Thig." "Thig will be this creature!" announced Torp. "With a psychic relay we will transfer the Earthman's memories and meager store of knowledge to the brain of Thig! He can then go out and scout this world without arousing suspicion. While he is gone, I will take Kam and explore the two inner planets." "You are the commander," said Thig. "But I wish this beast did not wear these clumsy sheathing upon his body. On Ortha we do not hamper the use of our limbs so." "Do not question the word of your commander," growled Torp, swelling out his thick chest menacingly. "It is for the good of our people that you disguise yourself as an Earthman." "For the good of the Horde," Thig intoned almost piously as he lifted Terry's body and headed for the laboratory. Service for the Horde was all that the men of Ortha knew. Carefully cultured and brought to life in the laboratories of their Horde, they knew neither father nor mother. Affection and love were entirely lacking in their early training and later life. They were trained antlike from childhood that only the growth and power of the Horde were of any moment. Men and women alike toiled and died like unfeeling robots of flesh and bone for the Horde. The Horde was their religion, their love-life, their everything! So it was that the bodies of the Earthman and the Orthan were strapped on two parallel tables of chill metal and the twin helmets, linked to one another by the intricacies of the psychic relay, put upon their heads. For ten hours or more the droning hum of the relay sucked Terry's brain dry of knowledge. The shock upon the nervous system of the Earthman proved too violent and his heart faltered after a time and stopped completely. Twice, with subtle drugs they restored pseudo-life to his body and kept the electrical impulses throbbing from his tortured brain, but after the third suspension of life Thig removed his helmet. "There is nothing more to learn," he informed his impassive comrades. "Now, let us get on with the plastic surgery that is required. My new body must return to its barbaric household before undue attention is aroused. And when I return I will take along some of the gleaming baubles we found on the red planet—these people value them highly." An hour later, his scars and altered cartilage already healed and painless, Thig again scraped sand over the entrance to the space ship and set out along the moonlit beach toward the nearest path running inland to his home. Memory was laying the country bare about him, Terry's own childhood memories of this particular section of Long Island. Here was the place where Jake and Ted had helped him dig for the buried treasure that old 'Notch-ear' Beggs had told them so exactly about. Remembrance of that episode gave Thig an idea about the little lump of jewels in his pocket. He had found them in a chest along the beach! He was coming up on the porch now and at the sound of his foot on the sagging boards the screen door burst open and three little Earth-creatures were hugging at his legs. An odd sensation, that his acquired memories labeled as pleasure, sent a warm glow upward from around his heart. Then he saw the slender red-haired shape of a woman, the mate of the dead man he knew, and confusion struck his well-trained brain. Men had no mates on Ortha, sex had been overthrown with all the other primitive impulses of barbarism; so he was incapable of understanding the emotions that swept through his acquired memory. Unsteadily he took her in his arms and felt her warm lips pressed, trembling, against his own. That same hot wave of pulsing blood choked achingly up into his throat. "Lew, dear," Ellen was asking, "where have you been all day? I called up at the landing but you were not there. I wanted to let you know that Saddlebag Publications sent a check for $50 for "Reversed Revolvers" and three other editors asked for shorts soon." "Shoulda got a hundred bucks for that yarn," grunted Thig, and gasped. For the moment he had been Lewis Terry and not Thig! So thoroughly had he acquired the knowledge of Terry that he found himself unconsciously adopting the thinking and mannerism of the other. All the better this way, he realized—more natural. "Sorry I was late," he said, digging into his pocket for the glittering baubles, "but I was poking around on the beach where we used to hunt treasure and I found an old chest. Inside it I found nothing but a handful of these." He flashed the jewels in front of Ellen's startled eyes and she clung, unbelieving, to his arm. "Why, Lew," she gasped, "they're worth a fortune! We can buy that new trailer now and have a rebuilt motor in the car. We can go west right away.... Hollywood, the Grand Canyon, cowboys!" "Uh huh," agreed the pseudo Lewis, memories of the ferocious savages and gunmen of his stories rendering him acutely unhappy. Sincerely he hoped that the west had reformed. "I saved some kraut and weiners," Ellen said. "Get washed up while I'm warming them up. Kids ate all the bread so I had to borrow some from the Eskoes. Want coffee, too?" "Mmmmmm," came from the depths of the chipped white wash-basin. "Home again," whispered Ellen as she stood beside Thig twelve weeks later and gazed tearfully at the weathered little gray house. She knelt beside the front stoop and reached for the key hidden beneath it. "The west was wonderful; tremendous, vast and beautiful," she went on as they climbed the steps, "but nowhere was there any place as beautiful as our own little strip of sky and water." Thig sank into a dusty old swing that hung on creaking chains from the exposed rafters of the porch roof. He looked down at the dusty gray car and the bulbous silvery bulk of the trailer that had been their living quarters for almost three months. Strange thoughts were afloat in the chaos of his cool Orthan brain. Tonight or tomorrow night at the latest he must contact his two fellows and report that Earth was a planetary paradise. No other world, including Ortha, was so well-favored and rich. An expeditionary force to wipe the grotesque civilizations of Earth out of existence would, of course, be necessary before the first units of new Hordes could be landed. And there Thig balked. Why must they destroy these people, imperfect though their civilization might be, to make room for the Hordes? Thig tried to tell himself that it was the transmitted thoughts of the dead Earthman that made him feel so, but he was not too sure. For three months he had lived with people who loved, hated, wept and sacrificed for reasons that he had never known existed. He had learned the heady glory of thinking for himself and making his own decisions. He had experienced the primitive joy of matching his wits and tongue against the wits of other unpredictable human beings. There was no abrupt division of men and women into definite classes of endeavor. A laborer thought the same thoughts that a governor might think. Uncertainty added zest to every day's life. The Orthan had come to question the sole devotion of the individual to the Horde to the exclusion of all other interests. What, he wondered, would one new world—or a hundred—populated by the Hordes add to the progress of humanity? For a hundred thousand years the Orthan civilization had remained static, its energies directed into certain well-defined channels. They were mindless bees maintaining their vast mechanical hives. There was that moment on the brink of the Grand Canyon when Ellen had caught his arm breathlessly at all the beauty spread away there beneath them. There were mornings in the desert when the sun painted in lurid red the peaks above the harsh black-and-whites of the sagebrush and cactus slopes. There was the little boy, his body burning with fever, who nestled trustingly against his tense man's body and slept—the son of Ellen and the man he had destroyed. Thig groaned. He was a weakling to let sentimentality so get the better of his judgment. He would go now to the space ship and urge them to blast off for Ortha. He sprang off the porch and strode away down the road toward the beach. The children ran to him; wanted to go along. He sent them away harshly but they smiled and waved their brown little hands. Ellen came to the door and called after him. "Hurry home, dear," she said. "I'll have a bite ready in about an hour." He dared not say anything, for his voice would have broken and she would have known something was wrong. She was a very wise sort of person when something was troubling him. He waved his stubby paw of a hand to show that he had heard, and blindly hurried toward the Sound. Oddly enough, as he hurried away along the narrow path through the autumn woods, his mind busied itself with a new epic of the west that lived no longer. He mentally titled it: "Rustlers' Riot" and blocked in the outlines of his plot. One section of his brain was that of the careless author of gunslinging yarns, a section that seemed to be sapping the life from his own brain. He knew that the story would never be written, but he toyed with the idea. So far had Thig the emotionless, robot-being from Ortha drifted from the unquestioning worship of the Horde! "You have done well," announced Torp when Thig had completed his report on the resources and temperatures of various sections of Terra. "We now have located three worlds fit for colonization and so we will return to Ortha at once. "I will recommend the conquest of this planet, 72-P-3 at once and the complete destruction of all biped life upon it. The mental aberrations of the barbaric natives might lead to endless complications if they were permitted to exist outside our ordered way of life. I imagine that three circuits of the planet about its primary should prove sufficient for the purposes of complete liquidation." "But why," asked Thig slowly, "could we not disarm all the natives and exile them on one of the less desirable continents, Antarctica for example or Siberia? They are primitive humans even as our race was once a race of primitives. It is not our duty to help to attain our own degree of knowledge and comfort?" "Only the good of the Horde matters!" shouted Torp angrily. "Shall a race of feeble-witted beasts, such as these Earthmen, stand in the way of a superior race? We want their world, and so we will take it. The Law of the Horde states that all the universe is ours for the taking." "Let us get back to Ortha at once, then," gritted out Thig savagely. "Never again do I wish to set foot upon the soil of this mad planet. There are forces at work upon Earth that we of Ortha have long forgotten." "Check the blood of Thig for disease, Kam," ordered Torp shortly. "His words are highly irrational. Some form of fever perhaps native to this world. While you examine him I will blast off for Ortha." Thig followed Kam into the tiny laboratory and found a seat beside the squat scientist's desk. His eyes roamed over the familiar instruments and gauges, each in its own precise position in the cases along the walls. His gaze lingered longest on the stubby black ugliness of a decomposition blaster in its rack close to the deck. A blast of the invisible radiations from that weapon's hot throat and flesh or vegetable fiber rotted into flaky ashes. The ship trembled beneath their feet; it tore free from the feeble clutch of the sand about it, and they were rocketing skyward. Thig's broad fingers bit deep into the unyielding metal of his chair. Suddenly he knew that he must go back to Earth, back to Ellen and the children of the man he had helped destroy. He loved Ellen, and nothing must stand between them! The Hordes of Ortha must find some other world, an empty world—this planet was not for them. "Turn back!" he cried wildly. "I must go back to Earth. There is a woman there, helpless and alone, who needs me! The Horde does not need this planet." Kam eyed him coldly and lifted a shining hypodermic syringe from its case. He approached Thig warily, aware that disease often made a maniac of the finest members of the Horde. "No human being is more important than the Horde," he stated baldly. "This woman of whom you speak is merely one unit of the millions we must eliminate for the good of the Horde." Then it was that Thig went berserk. His fists slashed into the thick jaw of the scientist and his fingers ripped at the hard cords overlying the Orthan's vital throat tubes. His fingers and thumb gouged deep into Kam's startled throat and choked off any cry for assistance before it could be uttered. Kam's hand swept down to the holster swung from his intricate harness and dragged his blaster from it. Thig's other hand clamped over his and for long moments they swayed there, locked together in silent deadly struggle. The fate of a world hung in the balance as Kam's other hand fought against that lone arm of Thig. The scales swung in favor of Kam. Slowly the flaring snout of his weapon tilted upward until it reached the level of Thig's waist. Thig suddenly released his grip and dragged his enemy toward him. A sudden reversal of pressure on Kam's gun hand sent the weapon swivelling about full upon its owner's thick torso. Thig's fingers pressed down upon Kam's button finger, down upon the stud set into the grip of the decomposition blaster, and Kam's muscles turned to water. He shrieked. Before Thig's eyes half of his comrade's body sloughed away into foul corruption that swiftly gave way to hardened blobs of dessicated matter. Horror for what he had done—that he had slain one of his own Horde—made his limbs move woodenly. All of his thoughts were dulled for the moment. Painfully slow, he turned his body around toward the control blister, turned around on leaden feet, to look full into the narrowed icy eyes of his commander. He saw the heavy barrel of the blaster slashing down against his skull but he could not swing a fraction of an inch out of the way. His body seemed paralyzed. This was the end, he thought as he waited stupidly for the blow to fall, the end for Ellen and the kids and all the struggling races of Earth. He would never write another cowboy yarn—they would all be dead anyhow soon. Then a thunderclap exploded against his head and he dropped endlessly toward the deck. Blows rained against his skull. He wondered if Torp would ever cease to hammer at him and turn the deadly ray of the weapon upon him. Blood throbbed and pounded with every blow.... Bam, Bam, Bam, the blood pounded in his ears. Like repeated blows of a hammer they shook his booming head. No longer was Torp above him. He was in the corner of the laboratory, a crumpled blood-smeared heap of bruised flesh and bone. He was unfettered and the blood was caked upon his skull and in his matted hair. Torp must have thought he had killed him with those savage blows upon the head. Even Torp, thought Thig ruefully, gave way to the primitive rage of his ancestors at times; but to that very bit of unconscious atavism he now owed his life. A cool-headed robot of an Orthan would have efficiently used the blaster to destroy any possibility of remaining life in his unconscious body. Thig rolled slowly over so that his eye found the door into the control room. Torp would be coming back again to dispose of their bodies through the refuse lock. Already the body of Kam was gone. He wondered why he had been left until last. Perhaps Torp wished to take cultures of his blood and tissues to determine whether a disease was responsible for his sudden madness. The cases of fragile instruments were just above his head. Association of memories brought him the flash of the heavy blaster in its rack beneath them. His hand went up and felt the welcome hardness of the weapon. He tugged it free. In a moment he was on his knees crawling across the plates of the deck toward the door. Halfway across the floor he collapsed on his face, the metal of the gun making a harsh clang. He heard the feet of Torp scuffle out of silence and a choked cry in the man's throat squalled out into a senseless whinny. Thig raised himself up on a quivering elbow and slid the black length of the blaster in front of him. His eyes sought the doorway and stared full into the glaring vacant orbs of his commander. Torp leaned there watching him, his breath gurgling brokenly through his deep-bitten lips. The clawing marks of nails, fingernails, furrowed his face and chest. He was a madman! The deadly attack of Thig; his own violent avenging of Kam's death, and now the apparent return of the man he had killed come to life had all served to jolt his rigidly trained brain from its accustomed groove. The shock had been too much for the established thought-processes of the Orthan. So Thig shot him where he stood, mercifully, before that vacant mad stare set him, too, to gibbering and shrieking. Then he stepped over the skeleton-thing that had been Torp, using the new strength that victory had given him to drive him along. He had saved a world's civilization from extinction! The thought sobered him; yet, somehow, he was pleased that he had done so. After all, it had been the Earthwoman and the children he had been thinking of while he battled Kam, a selfish desire to protect them all. He went to the desk where Torp had been writing in the ship's log and read the last few nervously scrawled lines: Planet 72-P-3 unfit for colonization. Some pernicious disease that strikes at the brain centers and causes violent insanity is existent there. Thig, just returned from a survey of the planet, went mad and destroyed Kam. In turn I was forced to slay him. But it is not ended. Already I feel the insidious virus of.... And there his writing ended abruptly. Thig nodded. That would do it. He set the automatic pilot for the planet Ortha. Unless a rogue asteroid or a comet crossed the ship's path she would return safely to Ortha with that mute warning of danger on 72-P-3. The body of Torp would help to confirm his final message. Then Thig crossed the cabin to the auxiliary life boat there, one of a half-dozen space ships in miniature nested within the great ship's hull, and cut free from the mother vessel. He flipped the drive lever, felt the thrumming of the rockets driving him from the parent ship. The sensation of free flight against his new body was strangely exhilerating and heady. It was the newest of the emotions he had experienced on Earth since that day, so many months before, when he had felt the warmness of Ellen's lips tight against his. Thig flipped the drive lever, felt the thrumming of the rockets driving him from the parent ship. He swung about to the port, watched the flaming drive-rockets of the great exploratory ship hurl it toward far-away Ortha, and there was no regret in his mind that he was not returning to the planet of his first existence. He thought of the dull greys and blacks of his planet, of the monotonous routine of existence that had once been his—and his heart thrilled to the memories of the starry nights and perfect exciting days he had spent on his three month trip over Earth. He made a brief salute to the existence he had known, turned with a tiny sigh, and his fingers made brief adjustments in the controls. The rocket-thrum deepened, and the thin whistle of tenuous air clutching the ship echoed through the hull-plates. He thought of many things in those few moments. He watched the roundness of Earth flatten out, then take on the cup-like illusion that all planets had for an incoming ship. He reduced the drive of his rockets to a mere whisper, striving to control the impatience that crowded his mind. He shivered suddenly, remembering his utter callousness the first time he had sent a space ship whipping down toward the hills and valleys below. And there was a sickness within him when he fully realized that, despite his acquired memory and traits, he was an alien from outer space. He fingered the tiny scars that had completely obliterated the slight differences in his appearance from an Earthman's, and his fingers trembled a bit, as he bent and stared through the vision port. He said a brief prayer in his heart to a God whose presence he now felt very deeply. There were tears in the depths of his eyes, then, and memories were hot, bitter pains. Earth was not far below him. As he let gravity suck him earthward, he heaved a gasp of relief. He was no longer Thig, a creature of a Horde's creation, but Lewis Terry, writer of lurid gun-smoking tales of the West. He must remember that always. He had destroyed the real Terry and now, for the rest of his life, he must make up to the dead man's family. The knowledge that Ellen's love was not really meant for him would be a knife twisting in his heart but for her sake he must endure it. Her dreams and happiness must never be shattered. The bulge of Earth was flattening out now and he could see the outlines of Long Island in the growing twilight. A new plot was growing in the brain of Lewis Terry, a yarn about a cowboy suddenly transported to another world. He smiled ironically. He had seen those other worlds. Perhaps some day he would write about them.... He was Lewis Terry! He must remember that!

Who is Thig and what happens to him throughout the story?

1

Thig is an Orthan who has spent his entire life devoted to the Horde. He has no family or friends, and he has never experienced love or real emotions. He is essentially part of an ant colony, and he spends every day working for the good of society and neglecting his own individuality. Thig is sent to Earth to investigate whether the planet will be a good place to relocate the Orthans. He must find a human and kill him in order to take over his mind and body . Thig quickly finds his victim in Lewis Terry, chokes him, takes him back to the ship, and gains all of his knowledge and his appearance. Thig is originally on Earth strictly for the mission, but once he joins Terry’s family, he immediately begins to have feelings for Terry’s wife, Ellen, and his three children. As Terry, Thig is affectionate, he takes part in real conversations, and he thinks about plots for Western novels. He truly discovers the joy of living on Earth on his three month vacation with Terry’s family. They take in the landscape and enjoy their time together. When he returns, he knows he has to tell Torp and Kam, two other Orthans on the mission, that Earth is a paradise and the other Orthans would love it. However, he wants nothing to do with the mass killing of humans. Although he originally follows through with his plan and returns to the spaceship, he almost immediately regrets his decision. He does not want to see Earth taken over by the Orthans. He finds the strength to fight off Kam and Torp and heads back to Earth, his new home. Thig realizes that his entire outlook on life has changed, and he can’t go back to being a cog in a machine. He feels real guilt for killing Terry, and he knows the only way to make it up to him is to take care of Ellen and the children for the rest of his life. He will leave the Orthans to colonize another planet, but he feels positive that they will stay away from Earth when the spaceship with two dead bodies returns to his home planet with a note that says that Earth carries a deadly disease.

62198

QUEST OF THIG By BASIL WELLS Thig of Ortha was the vanguard of the conquering "HORDE." He had blasted across trackless space to subdue a defenseless world—only to meet on Earth emotions that were more deadly than weapons. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Thig carefully smoothed the dark sand and seaweed of the lonely beach over the metal lid of the flexible ringed tunnel that linked the grubby ship from another planet with the upper air. He looked out across the heaving waters of the Sound toward Connecticut. He stared appraisingly around at the luxuriant green growth of foliage further inland; and started toward the little stretch of trees and brush, walking carefully because of the lesser gravitation. Thig was shorter than the average Earthman—although on Ortha he was well above the average in height—but his body was thick and powerfully muscled. His skull was well-shaped and large; his features were regular, perhaps a trifle oversize, and his hair and eyes were a curiously matching blend of reddish brown. Oddest of all, he wore no garments, other than the necessary belt and straps to support his rod-like weapon of white metal and his pouches for food and specimens. The Orthan entered the narrow strip of trees and crossed to the little-used highway on the other side. Here he patiently sat down to wait for an Earthman or an Earthwoman to pass. His task now was to bring a native, intact if possible, back to the carefully buried space cruiser where his two fellows and himself would drain the creature's mentality of all its knowledge. In this way they could learn whether a planet was suited for colonization by later swarms of Orthans. Already they had charted over a hundred celestial bodies but of them all only three had proven worthy of consideration. This latest planet, however, 72-P-3 on the chart, appeared to be an ideal world in every respect. Sunlight, plenty of water and a dense atmospheric envelope made of 72-P-3 a paradise among planets. The explorer from another world crouched into the concealment of a leafy shrub. A creature was approaching. Its squat body was covered with baggy strips of bluish cloth and it carried a jointed rod of metal and wood in its paw. It walked upright as did the men of Ortha. Thig's cold eyes opened a trifle wider as he stared into the thing's stupid face. It was as though he was looking into a bit of polished metal at the reflection of himself! The Earthman was opposite now and he must waste no more precious time. The mighty muscles of the Orthan sent him hurtling across the intervening space in two prodigious bounds, and his hands clamped across the mouth and neck of the stranger.... Lewis Terry was going fishing. For a week the typewriter mill that had ground out a thousand assorted yarns of the untamed West and the frigid desolation of the Northwoods had been silent. Lewis wondered if he was going stale. He had sat every day for eight hours in front of that shiny-buttoned bane of the typist, but there were no results. Feebly he had punched a key two days ago and a $ sign had appeared. He hadn't dared touch the machine since. For Mr. Terry, that hard-hitting writer of two-gun action, had never been further west of Long Island than Elizabeth, and he had promised his wife, Ellen, that he would take the three children and herself on a trailer tour of the West that very summer. Since that promise, he could not write a word. Visions of whooping red-skinned Apaches and be-chapped outlaws raiding his little trailer home kept rolling up out of his subconscious. Yet he had to write at least three novelets and a fistful of short stories in the next two weeks to finance the great adventure—or the trip was off. So Lewis left the weathered old cottage in the early dawn and headed for his tubby old boat at the landing in an attempt to work out a salable yarn.... "Hey!" he shouted as a naked man sprang out of the bushes beside the road. "What's the trouble?" Then he had no time for further speech, the massive arms of the stranger had wound around him and two hamlike hands shut off his speech and his wind. He fought futilely against trained muscles. The hand clamping his throat relaxed for a moment and hacked along the side of his head. Blackness flooded the brain of Lewis, and he knew no more. "There it is," announced Thig, dropping the limp body of the captured Earthman to the metal deck-plates. "It is a male of the species that must have built the cities we saw as we landed." "He resembles Thig," announced Kam. "But for the strange covering he wears he might be Thig." "Thig will be this creature!" announced Torp. "With a psychic relay we will transfer the Earthman's memories and meager store of knowledge to the brain of Thig! He can then go out and scout this world without arousing suspicion. While he is gone, I will take Kam and explore the two inner planets." "You are the commander," said Thig. "But I wish this beast did not wear these clumsy sheathing upon his body. On Ortha we do not hamper the use of our limbs so." "Do not question the word of your commander," growled Torp, swelling out his thick chest menacingly. "It is for the good of our people that you disguise yourself as an Earthman." "For the good of the Horde," Thig intoned almost piously as he lifted Terry's body and headed for the laboratory. Service for the Horde was all that the men of Ortha knew. Carefully cultured and brought to life in the laboratories of their Horde, they knew neither father nor mother. Affection and love were entirely lacking in their early training and later life. They were trained antlike from childhood that only the growth and power of the Horde were of any moment. Men and women alike toiled and died like unfeeling robots of flesh and bone for the Horde. The Horde was their religion, their love-life, their everything! So it was that the bodies of the Earthman and the Orthan were strapped on two parallel tables of chill metal and the twin helmets, linked to one another by the intricacies of the psychic relay, put upon their heads. For ten hours or more the droning hum of the relay sucked Terry's brain dry of knowledge. The shock upon the nervous system of the Earthman proved too violent and his heart faltered after a time and stopped completely. Twice, with subtle drugs they restored pseudo-life to his body and kept the electrical impulses throbbing from his tortured brain, but after the third suspension of life Thig removed his helmet. "There is nothing more to learn," he informed his impassive comrades. "Now, let us get on with the plastic surgery that is required. My new body must return to its barbaric household before undue attention is aroused. And when I return I will take along some of the gleaming baubles we found on the red planet—these people value them highly." An hour later, his scars and altered cartilage already healed and painless, Thig again scraped sand over the entrance to the space ship and set out along the moonlit beach toward the nearest path running inland to his home. Memory was laying the country bare about him, Terry's own childhood memories of this particular section of Long Island. Here was the place where Jake and Ted had helped him dig for the buried treasure that old 'Notch-ear' Beggs had told them so exactly about. Remembrance of that episode gave Thig an idea about the little lump of jewels in his pocket. He had found them in a chest along the beach! He was coming up on the porch now and at the sound of his foot on the sagging boards the screen door burst open and three little Earth-creatures were hugging at his legs. An odd sensation, that his acquired memories labeled as pleasure, sent a warm glow upward from around his heart. Then he saw the slender red-haired shape of a woman, the mate of the dead man he knew, and confusion struck his well-trained brain. Men had no mates on Ortha, sex had been overthrown with all the other primitive impulses of barbarism; so he was incapable of understanding the emotions that swept through his acquired memory. Unsteadily he took her in his arms and felt her warm lips pressed, trembling, against his own. That same hot wave of pulsing blood choked achingly up into his throat. "Lew, dear," Ellen was asking, "where have you been all day? I called up at the landing but you were not there. I wanted to let you know that Saddlebag Publications sent a check for $50 for "Reversed Revolvers" and three other editors asked for shorts soon." "Shoulda got a hundred bucks for that yarn," grunted Thig, and gasped. For the moment he had been Lewis Terry and not Thig! So thoroughly had he acquired the knowledge of Terry that he found himself unconsciously adopting the thinking and mannerism of the other. All the better this way, he realized—more natural. "Sorry I was late," he said, digging into his pocket for the glittering baubles, "but I was poking around on the beach where we used to hunt treasure and I found an old chest. Inside it I found nothing but a handful of these." He flashed the jewels in front of Ellen's startled eyes and she clung, unbelieving, to his arm. "Why, Lew," she gasped, "they're worth a fortune! We can buy that new trailer now and have a rebuilt motor in the car. We can go west right away.... Hollywood, the Grand Canyon, cowboys!" "Uh huh," agreed the pseudo Lewis, memories of the ferocious savages and gunmen of his stories rendering him acutely unhappy. Sincerely he hoped that the west had reformed. "I saved some kraut and weiners," Ellen said. "Get washed up while I'm warming them up. Kids ate all the bread so I had to borrow some from the Eskoes. Want coffee, too?" "Mmmmmm," came from the depths of the chipped white wash-basin. "Home again," whispered Ellen as she stood beside Thig twelve weeks later and gazed tearfully at the weathered little gray house. She knelt beside the front stoop and reached for the key hidden beneath it. "The west was wonderful; tremendous, vast and beautiful," she went on as they climbed the steps, "but nowhere was there any place as beautiful as our own little strip of sky and water." Thig sank into a dusty old swing that hung on creaking chains from the exposed rafters of the porch roof. He looked down at the dusty gray car and the bulbous silvery bulk of the trailer that had been their living quarters for almost three months. Strange thoughts were afloat in the chaos of his cool Orthan brain. Tonight or tomorrow night at the latest he must contact his two fellows and report that Earth was a planetary paradise. No other world, including Ortha, was so well-favored and rich. An expeditionary force to wipe the grotesque civilizations of Earth out of existence would, of course, be necessary before the first units of new Hordes could be landed. And there Thig balked. Why must they destroy these people, imperfect though their civilization might be, to make room for the Hordes? Thig tried to tell himself that it was the transmitted thoughts of the dead Earthman that made him feel so, but he was not too sure. For three months he had lived with people who loved, hated, wept and sacrificed for reasons that he had never known existed. He had learned the heady glory of thinking for himself and making his own decisions. He had experienced the primitive joy of matching his wits and tongue against the wits of other unpredictable human beings. There was no abrupt division of men and women into definite classes of endeavor. A laborer thought the same thoughts that a governor might think. Uncertainty added zest to every day's life. The Orthan had come to question the sole devotion of the individual to the Horde to the exclusion of all other interests. What, he wondered, would one new world—or a hundred—populated by the Hordes add to the progress of humanity? For a hundred thousand years the Orthan civilization had remained static, its energies directed into certain well-defined channels. They were mindless bees maintaining their vast mechanical hives. There was that moment on the brink of the Grand Canyon when Ellen had caught his arm breathlessly at all the beauty spread away there beneath them. There were mornings in the desert when the sun painted in lurid red the peaks above the harsh black-and-whites of the sagebrush and cactus slopes. There was the little boy, his body burning with fever, who nestled trustingly against his tense man's body and slept—the son of Ellen and the man he had destroyed. Thig groaned. He was a weakling to let sentimentality so get the better of his judgment. He would go now to the space ship and urge them to blast off for Ortha. He sprang off the porch and strode away down the road toward the beach. The children ran to him; wanted to go along. He sent them away harshly but they smiled and waved their brown little hands. Ellen came to the door and called after him. "Hurry home, dear," she said. "I'll have a bite ready in about an hour." He dared not say anything, for his voice would have broken and she would have known something was wrong. She was a very wise sort of person when something was troubling him. He waved his stubby paw of a hand to show that he had heard, and blindly hurried toward the Sound. Oddly enough, as he hurried away along the narrow path through the autumn woods, his mind busied itself with a new epic of the west that lived no longer. He mentally titled it: "Rustlers' Riot" and blocked in the outlines of his plot. One section of his brain was that of the careless author of gunslinging yarns, a section that seemed to be sapping the life from his own brain. He knew that the story would never be written, but he toyed with the idea. So far had Thig the emotionless, robot-being from Ortha drifted from the unquestioning worship of the Horde! "You have done well," announced Torp when Thig had completed his report on the resources and temperatures of various sections of Terra. "We now have located three worlds fit for colonization and so we will return to Ortha at once. "I will recommend the conquest of this planet, 72-P-3 at once and the complete destruction of all biped life upon it. The mental aberrations of the barbaric natives might lead to endless complications if they were permitted to exist outside our ordered way of life. I imagine that three circuits of the planet about its primary should prove sufficient for the purposes of complete liquidation." "But why," asked Thig slowly, "could we not disarm all the natives and exile them on one of the less desirable continents, Antarctica for example or Siberia? They are primitive humans even as our race was once a race of primitives. It is not our duty to help to attain our own degree of knowledge and comfort?" "Only the good of the Horde matters!" shouted Torp angrily. "Shall a race of feeble-witted beasts, such as these Earthmen, stand in the way of a superior race? We want their world, and so we will take it. The Law of the Horde states that all the universe is ours for the taking." "Let us get back to Ortha at once, then," gritted out Thig savagely. "Never again do I wish to set foot upon the soil of this mad planet. There are forces at work upon Earth that we of Ortha have long forgotten." "Check the blood of Thig for disease, Kam," ordered Torp shortly. "His words are highly irrational. Some form of fever perhaps native to this world. While you examine him I will blast off for Ortha." Thig followed Kam into the tiny laboratory and found a seat beside the squat scientist's desk. His eyes roamed over the familiar instruments and gauges, each in its own precise position in the cases along the walls. His gaze lingered longest on the stubby black ugliness of a decomposition blaster in its rack close to the deck. A blast of the invisible radiations from that weapon's hot throat and flesh or vegetable fiber rotted into flaky ashes. The ship trembled beneath their feet; it tore free from the feeble clutch of the sand about it, and they were rocketing skyward. Thig's broad fingers bit deep into the unyielding metal of his chair. Suddenly he knew that he must go back to Earth, back to Ellen and the children of the man he had helped destroy. He loved Ellen, and nothing must stand between them! The Hordes of Ortha must find some other world, an empty world—this planet was not for them. "Turn back!" he cried wildly. "I must go back to Earth. There is a woman there, helpless and alone, who needs me! The Horde does not need this planet." Kam eyed him coldly and lifted a shining hypodermic syringe from its case. He approached Thig warily, aware that disease often made a maniac of the finest members of the Horde. "No human being is more important than the Horde," he stated baldly. "This woman of whom you speak is merely one unit of the millions we must eliminate for the good of the Horde." Then it was that Thig went berserk. His fists slashed into the thick jaw of the scientist and his fingers ripped at the hard cords overlying the Orthan's vital throat tubes. His fingers and thumb gouged deep into Kam's startled throat and choked off any cry for assistance before it could be uttered. Kam's hand swept down to the holster swung from his intricate harness and dragged his blaster from it. Thig's other hand clamped over his and for long moments they swayed there, locked together in silent deadly struggle. The fate of a world hung in the balance as Kam's other hand fought against that lone arm of Thig. The scales swung in favor of Kam. Slowly the flaring snout of his weapon tilted upward until it reached the level of Thig's waist. Thig suddenly released his grip and dragged his enemy toward him. A sudden reversal of pressure on Kam's gun hand sent the weapon swivelling about full upon its owner's thick torso. Thig's fingers pressed down upon Kam's button finger, down upon the stud set into the grip of the decomposition blaster, and Kam's muscles turned to water. He shrieked. Before Thig's eyes half of his comrade's body sloughed away into foul corruption that swiftly gave way to hardened blobs of dessicated matter. Horror for what he had done—that he had slain one of his own Horde—made his limbs move woodenly. All of his thoughts were dulled for the moment. Painfully slow, he turned his body around toward the control blister, turned around on leaden feet, to look full into the narrowed icy eyes of his commander. He saw the heavy barrel of the blaster slashing down against his skull but he could not swing a fraction of an inch out of the way. His body seemed paralyzed. This was the end, he thought as he waited stupidly for the blow to fall, the end for Ellen and the kids and all the struggling races of Earth. He would never write another cowboy yarn—they would all be dead anyhow soon. Then a thunderclap exploded against his head and he dropped endlessly toward the deck. Blows rained against his skull. He wondered if Torp would ever cease to hammer at him and turn the deadly ray of the weapon upon him. Blood throbbed and pounded with every blow.... Bam, Bam, Bam, the blood pounded in his ears. Like repeated blows of a hammer they shook his booming head. No longer was Torp above him. He was in the corner of the laboratory, a crumpled blood-smeared heap of bruised flesh and bone. He was unfettered and the blood was caked upon his skull and in his matted hair. Torp must have thought he had killed him with those savage blows upon the head. Even Torp, thought Thig ruefully, gave way to the primitive rage of his ancestors at times; but to that very bit of unconscious atavism he now owed his life. A cool-headed robot of an Orthan would have efficiently used the blaster to destroy any possibility of remaining life in his unconscious body. Thig rolled slowly over so that his eye found the door into the control room. Torp would be coming back again to dispose of their bodies through the refuse lock. Already the body of Kam was gone. He wondered why he had been left until last. Perhaps Torp wished to take cultures of his blood and tissues to determine whether a disease was responsible for his sudden madness. The cases of fragile instruments were just above his head. Association of memories brought him the flash of the heavy blaster in its rack beneath them. His hand went up and felt the welcome hardness of the weapon. He tugged it free. In a moment he was on his knees crawling across the plates of the deck toward the door. Halfway across the floor he collapsed on his face, the metal of the gun making a harsh clang. He heard the feet of Torp scuffle out of silence and a choked cry in the man's throat squalled out into a senseless whinny. Thig raised himself up on a quivering elbow and slid the black length of the blaster in front of him. His eyes sought the doorway and stared full into the glaring vacant orbs of his commander. Torp leaned there watching him, his breath gurgling brokenly through his deep-bitten lips. The clawing marks of nails, fingernails, furrowed his face and chest. He was a madman! The deadly attack of Thig; his own violent avenging of Kam's death, and now the apparent return of the man he had killed come to life had all served to jolt his rigidly trained brain from its accustomed groove. The shock had been too much for the established thought-processes of the Orthan. So Thig shot him where he stood, mercifully, before that vacant mad stare set him, too, to gibbering and shrieking. Then he stepped over the skeleton-thing that had been Torp, using the new strength that victory had given him to drive him along. He had saved a world's civilization from extinction! The thought sobered him; yet, somehow, he was pleased that he had done so. After all, it had been the Earthwoman and the children he had been thinking of while he battled Kam, a selfish desire to protect them all. He went to the desk where Torp had been writing in the ship's log and read the last few nervously scrawled lines: Planet 72-P-3 unfit for colonization. Some pernicious disease that strikes at the brain centers and causes violent insanity is existent there. Thig, just returned from a survey of the planet, went mad and destroyed Kam. In turn I was forced to slay him. But it is not ended. Already I feel the insidious virus of.... And there his writing ended abruptly. Thig nodded. That would do it. He set the automatic pilot for the planet Ortha. Unless a rogue asteroid or a comet crossed the ship's path she would return safely to Ortha with that mute warning of danger on 72-P-3. The body of Torp would help to confirm his final message. Then Thig crossed the cabin to the auxiliary life boat there, one of a half-dozen space ships in miniature nested within the great ship's hull, and cut free from the mother vessel. He flipped the drive lever, felt the thrumming of the rockets driving him from the parent ship. The sensation of free flight against his new body was strangely exhilerating and heady. It was the newest of the emotions he had experienced on Earth since that day, so many months before, when he had felt the warmness of Ellen's lips tight against his. Thig flipped the drive lever, felt the thrumming of the rockets driving him from the parent ship. He swung about to the port, watched the flaming drive-rockets of the great exploratory ship hurl it toward far-away Ortha, and there was no regret in his mind that he was not returning to the planet of his first existence. He thought of the dull greys and blacks of his planet, of the monotonous routine of existence that had once been his—and his heart thrilled to the memories of the starry nights and perfect exciting days he had spent on his three month trip over Earth. He made a brief salute to the existence he had known, turned with a tiny sigh, and his fingers made brief adjustments in the controls. The rocket-thrum deepened, and the thin whistle of tenuous air clutching the ship echoed through the hull-plates. He thought of many things in those few moments. He watched the roundness of Earth flatten out, then take on the cup-like illusion that all planets had for an incoming ship. He reduced the drive of his rockets to a mere whisper, striving to control the impatience that crowded his mind. He shivered suddenly, remembering his utter callousness the first time he had sent a space ship whipping down toward the hills and valleys below. And there was a sickness within him when he fully realized that, despite his acquired memory and traits, he was an alien from outer space. He fingered the tiny scars that had completely obliterated the slight differences in his appearance from an Earthman's, and his fingers trembled a bit, as he bent and stared through the vision port. He said a brief prayer in his heart to a God whose presence he now felt very deeply. There were tears in the depths of his eyes, then, and memories were hot, bitter pains. Earth was not far below him. As he let gravity suck him earthward, he heaved a gasp of relief. He was no longer Thig, a creature of a Horde's creation, but Lewis Terry, writer of lurid gun-smoking tales of the West. He must remember that always. He had destroyed the real Terry and now, for the rest of his life, he must make up to the dead man's family. The knowledge that Ellen's love was not really meant for him would be a knife twisting in his heart but for her sake he must endure it. Her dreams and happiness must never be shattered. The bulge of Earth was flattening out now and he could see the outlines of Long Island in the growing twilight. A new plot was growing in the brain of Lewis Terry, a yarn about a cowboy suddenly transported to another world. He smiled ironically. He had seen those other worlds. Perhaps some day he would write about them.... He was Lewis Terry! He must remember that!

Who is Thig and what happens to him throughout the story?

2

Thig is a man from Ortha who travels around the galaxy with two other men, looking for another planet that the Orthans can occupy. He lands on Earth and captures a human, Lewis Terry, to take to the space cruiser. Thig looks so much like the human that the Orthans decide to transfer the human’s knowledge and memories to Thig and let him explore the planet in the guise of the man. When Thig encounters the human’s family, he begins to have warm feelings for them, although all feelings and emotions have been removed from the Orthans for hundreds of thousands of years. After the family spends three months on a trip out West, Thig has changed. Instead of thinking only of the good of the Horde of Orthans, he now questions that single-minded devotion and considers the Orthans mindless bees who don’t know the pleasure of thinking for themselves and making their own decisions as the Earthmen do. When the family returns home from the trip out West, he reports what he has learned to Torp, who declares that the planet is suitable and the humans must be destroyed. Thig asks if the Orthans couldn’t just disarm the humans and exile them to a less desirable continent, and Torp thinks he must be sick and orders Kam to check Thig’s blood for disease. As they launch into space, Thig is overwhelmed with the desire to protect Ellen; he realizes he loves her. After defeating Kam and Torp and heading back to Earth, he realizes that he thinks like Lewis Terry and must BE Lewis Terry. His Orthan values and identity no longer matter.

62198

QUEST OF THIG By BASIL WELLS Thig of Ortha was the vanguard of the conquering "HORDE." He had blasted across trackless space to subdue a defenseless world—only to meet on Earth emotions that were more deadly than weapons. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Thig carefully smoothed the dark sand and seaweed of the lonely beach over the metal lid of the flexible ringed tunnel that linked the grubby ship from another planet with the upper air. He looked out across the heaving waters of the Sound toward Connecticut. He stared appraisingly around at the luxuriant green growth of foliage further inland; and started toward the little stretch of trees and brush, walking carefully because of the lesser gravitation. Thig was shorter than the average Earthman—although on Ortha he was well above the average in height—but his body was thick and powerfully muscled. His skull was well-shaped and large; his features were regular, perhaps a trifle oversize, and his hair and eyes were a curiously matching blend of reddish brown. Oddest of all, he wore no garments, other than the necessary belt and straps to support his rod-like weapon of white metal and his pouches for food and specimens. The Orthan entered the narrow strip of trees and crossed to the little-used highway on the other side. Here he patiently sat down to wait for an Earthman or an Earthwoman to pass. His task now was to bring a native, intact if possible, back to the carefully buried space cruiser where his two fellows and himself would drain the creature's mentality of all its knowledge. In this way they could learn whether a planet was suited for colonization by later swarms of Orthans. Already they had charted over a hundred celestial bodies but of them all only three had proven worthy of consideration. This latest planet, however, 72-P-3 on the chart, appeared to be an ideal world in every respect. Sunlight, plenty of water and a dense atmospheric envelope made of 72-P-3 a paradise among planets. The explorer from another world crouched into the concealment of a leafy shrub. A creature was approaching. Its squat body was covered with baggy strips of bluish cloth and it carried a jointed rod of metal and wood in its paw. It walked upright as did the men of Ortha. Thig's cold eyes opened a trifle wider as he stared into the thing's stupid face. It was as though he was looking into a bit of polished metal at the reflection of himself! The Earthman was opposite now and he must waste no more precious time. The mighty muscles of the Orthan sent him hurtling across the intervening space in two prodigious bounds, and his hands clamped across the mouth and neck of the stranger.... Lewis Terry was going fishing. For a week the typewriter mill that had ground out a thousand assorted yarns of the untamed West and the frigid desolation of the Northwoods had been silent. Lewis wondered if he was going stale. He had sat every day for eight hours in front of that shiny-buttoned bane of the typist, but there were no results. Feebly he had punched a key two days ago and a $ sign had appeared. He hadn't dared touch the machine since. For Mr. Terry, that hard-hitting writer of two-gun action, had never been further west of Long Island than Elizabeth, and he had promised his wife, Ellen, that he would take the three children and herself on a trailer tour of the West that very summer. Since that promise, he could not write a word. Visions of whooping red-skinned Apaches and be-chapped outlaws raiding his little trailer home kept rolling up out of his subconscious. Yet he had to write at least three novelets and a fistful of short stories in the next two weeks to finance the great adventure—or the trip was off. So Lewis left the weathered old cottage in the early dawn and headed for his tubby old boat at the landing in an attempt to work out a salable yarn.... "Hey!" he shouted as a naked man sprang out of the bushes beside the road. "What's the trouble?" Then he had no time for further speech, the massive arms of the stranger had wound around him and two hamlike hands shut off his speech and his wind. He fought futilely against trained muscles. The hand clamping his throat relaxed for a moment and hacked along the side of his head. Blackness flooded the brain of Lewis, and he knew no more. "There it is," announced Thig, dropping the limp body of the captured Earthman to the metal deck-plates. "It is a male of the species that must have built the cities we saw as we landed." "He resembles Thig," announced Kam. "But for the strange covering he wears he might be Thig." "Thig will be this creature!" announced Torp. "With a psychic relay we will transfer the Earthman's memories and meager store of knowledge to the brain of Thig! He can then go out and scout this world without arousing suspicion. While he is gone, I will take Kam and explore the two inner planets." "You are the commander," said Thig. "But I wish this beast did not wear these clumsy sheathing upon his body. On Ortha we do not hamper the use of our limbs so." "Do not question the word of your commander," growled Torp, swelling out his thick chest menacingly. "It is for the good of our people that you disguise yourself as an Earthman." "For the good of the Horde," Thig intoned almost piously as he lifted Terry's body and headed for the laboratory. Service for the Horde was all that the men of Ortha knew. Carefully cultured and brought to life in the laboratories of their Horde, they knew neither father nor mother. Affection and love were entirely lacking in their early training and later life. They were trained antlike from childhood that only the growth and power of the Horde were of any moment. Men and women alike toiled and died like unfeeling robots of flesh and bone for the Horde. The Horde was their religion, their love-life, their everything! So it was that the bodies of the Earthman and the Orthan were strapped on two parallel tables of chill metal and the twin helmets, linked to one another by the intricacies of the psychic relay, put upon their heads. For ten hours or more the droning hum of the relay sucked Terry's brain dry of knowledge. The shock upon the nervous system of the Earthman proved too violent and his heart faltered after a time and stopped completely. Twice, with subtle drugs they restored pseudo-life to his body and kept the electrical impulses throbbing from his tortured brain, but after the third suspension of life Thig removed his helmet. "There is nothing more to learn," he informed his impassive comrades. "Now, let us get on with the plastic surgery that is required. My new body must return to its barbaric household before undue attention is aroused. And when I return I will take along some of the gleaming baubles we found on the red planet—these people value them highly." An hour later, his scars and altered cartilage already healed and painless, Thig again scraped sand over the entrance to the space ship and set out along the moonlit beach toward the nearest path running inland to his home. Memory was laying the country bare about him, Terry's own childhood memories of this particular section of Long Island. Here was the place where Jake and Ted had helped him dig for the buried treasure that old 'Notch-ear' Beggs had told them so exactly about. Remembrance of that episode gave Thig an idea about the little lump of jewels in his pocket. He had found them in a chest along the beach! He was coming up on the porch now and at the sound of his foot on the sagging boards the screen door burst open and three little Earth-creatures were hugging at his legs. An odd sensation, that his acquired memories labeled as pleasure, sent a warm glow upward from around his heart. Then he saw the slender red-haired shape of a woman, the mate of the dead man he knew, and confusion struck his well-trained brain. Men had no mates on Ortha, sex had been overthrown with all the other primitive impulses of barbarism; so he was incapable of understanding the emotions that swept through his acquired memory. Unsteadily he took her in his arms and felt her warm lips pressed, trembling, against his own. That same hot wave of pulsing blood choked achingly up into his throat. "Lew, dear," Ellen was asking, "where have you been all day? I called up at the landing but you were not there. I wanted to let you know that Saddlebag Publications sent a check for $50 for "Reversed Revolvers" and three other editors asked for shorts soon." "Shoulda got a hundred bucks for that yarn," grunted Thig, and gasped. For the moment he had been Lewis Terry and not Thig! So thoroughly had he acquired the knowledge of Terry that he found himself unconsciously adopting the thinking and mannerism of the other. All the better this way, he realized—more natural. "Sorry I was late," he said, digging into his pocket for the glittering baubles, "but I was poking around on the beach where we used to hunt treasure and I found an old chest. Inside it I found nothing but a handful of these." He flashed the jewels in front of Ellen's startled eyes and she clung, unbelieving, to his arm. "Why, Lew," she gasped, "they're worth a fortune! We can buy that new trailer now and have a rebuilt motor in the car. We can go west right away.... Hollywood, the Grand Canyon, cowboys!" "Uh huh," agreed the pseudo Lewis, memories of the ferocious savages and gunmen of his stories rendering him acutely unhappy. Sincerely he hoped that the west had reformed. "I saved some kraut and weiners," Ellen said. "Get washed up while I'm warming them up. Kids ate all the bread so I had to borrow some from the Eskoes. Want coffee, too?" "Mmmmmm," came from the depths of the chipped white wash-basin. "Home again," whispered Ellen as she stood beside Thig twelve weeks later and gazed tearfully at the weathered little gray house. She knelt beside the front stoop and reached for the key hidden beneath it. "The west was wonderful; tremendous, vast and beautiful," she went on as they climbed the steps, "but nowhere was there any place as beautiful as our own little strip of sky and water." Thig sank into a dusty old swing that hung on creaking chains from the exposed rafters of the porch roof. He looked down at the dusty gray car and the bulbous silvery bulk of the trailer that had been their living quarters for almost three months. Strange thoughts were afloat in the chaos of his cool Orthan brain. Tonight or tomorrow night at the latest he must contact his two fellows and report that Earth was a planetary paradise. No other world, including Ortha, was so well-favored and rich. An expeditionary force to wipe the grotesque civilizations of Earth out of existence would, of course, be necessary before the first units of new Hordes could be landed. And there Thig balked. Why must they destroy these people, imperfect though their civilization might be, to make room for the Hordes? Thig tried to tell himself that it was the transmitted thoughts of the dead Earthman that made him feel so, but he was not too sure. For three months he had lived with people who loved, hated, wept and sacrificed for reasons that he had never known existed. He had learned the heady glory of thinking for himself and making his own decisions. He had experienced the primitive joy of matching his wits and tongue against the wits of other unpredictable human beings. There was no abrupt division of men and women into definite classes of endeavor. A laborer thought the same thoughts that a governor might think. Uncertainty added zest to every day's life. The Orthan had come to question the sole devotion of the individual to the Horde to the exclusion of all other interests. What, he wondered, would one new world—or a hundred—populated by the Hordes add to the progress of humanity? For a hundred thousand years the Orthan civilization had remained static, its energies directed into certain well-defined channels. They were mindless bees maintaining their vast mechanical hives. There was that moment on the brink of the Grand Canyon when Ellen had caught his arm breathlessly at all the beauty spread away there beneath them. There were mornings in the desert when the sun painted in lurid red the peaks above the harsh black-and-whites of the sagebrush and cactus slopes. There was the little boy, his body burning with fever, who nestled trustingly against his tense man's body and slept—the son of Ellen and the man he had destroyed. Thig groaned. He was a weakling to let sentimentality so get the better of his judgment. He would go now to the space ship and urge them to blast off for Ortha. He sprang off the porch and strode away down the road toward the beach. The children ran to him; wanted to go along. He sent them away harshly but they smiled and waved their brown little hands. Ellen came to the door and called after him. "Hurry home, dear," she said. "I'll have a bite ready in about an hour." He dared not say anything, for his voice would have broken and she would have known something was wrong. She was a very wise sort of person when something was troubling him. He waved his stubby paw of a hand to show that he had heard, and blindly hurried toward the Sound. Oddly enough, as he hurried away along the narrow path through the autumn woods, his mind busied itself with a new epic of the west that lived no longer. He mentally titled it: "Rustlers' Riot" and blocked in the outlines of his plot. One section of his brain was that of the careless author of gunslinging yarns, a section that seemed to be sapping the life from his own brain. He knew that the story would never be written, but he toyed with the idea. So far had Thig the emotionless, robot-being from Ortha drifted from the unquestioning worship of the Horde! "You have done well," announced Torp when Thig had completed his report on the resources and temperatures of various sections of Terra. "We now have located three worlds fit for colonization and so we will return to Ortha at once. "I will recommend the conquest of this planet, 72-P-3 at once and the complete destruction of all biped life upon it. The mental aberrations of the barbaric natives might lead to endless complications if they were permitted to exist outside our ordered way of life. I imagine that three circuits of the planet about its primary should prove sufficient for the purposes of complete liquidation." "But why," asked Thig slowly, "could we not disarm all the natives and exile them on one of the less desirable continents, Antarctica for example or Siberia? They are primitive humans even as our race was once a race of primitives. It is not our duty to help to attain our own degree of knowledge and comfort?" "Only the good of the Horde matters!" shouted Torp angrily. "Shall a race of feeble-witted beasts, such as these Earthmen, stand in the way of a superior race? We want their world, and so we will take it. The Law of the Horde states that all the universe is ours for the taking." "Let us get back to Ortha at once, then," gritted out Thig savagely. "Never again do I wish to set foot upon the soil of this mad planet. There are forces at work upon Earth that we of Ortha have long forgotten." "Check the blood of Thig for disease, Kam," ordered Torp shortly. "His words are highly irrational. Some form of fever perhaps native to this world. While you examine him I will blast off for Ortha." Thig followed Kam into the tiny laboratory and found a seat beside the squat scientist's desk. His eyes roamed over the familiar instruments and gauges, each in its own precise position in the cases along the walls. His gaze lingered longest on the stubby black ugliness of a decomposition blaster in its rack close to the deck. A blast of the invisible radiations from that weapon's hot throat and flesh or vegetable fiber rotted into flaky ashes. The ship trembled beneath their feet; it tore free from the feeble clutch of the sand about it, and they were rocketing skyward. Thig's broad fingers bit deep into the unyielding metal of his chair. Suddenly he knew that he must go back to Earth, back to Ellen and the children of the man he had helped destroy. He loved Ellen, and nothing must stand between them! The Hordes of Ortha must find some other world, an empty world—this planet was not for them. "Turn back!" he cried wildly. "I must go back to Earth. There is a woman there, helpless and alone, who needs me! The Horde does not need this planet." Kam eyed him coldly and lifted a shining hypodermic syringe from its case. He approached Thig warily, aware that disease often made a maniac of the finest members of the Horde. "No human being is more important than the Horde," he stated baldly. "This woman of whom you speak is merely one unit of the millions we must eliminate for the good of the Horde." Then it was that Thig went berserk. His fists slashed into the thick jaw of the scientist and his fingers ripped at the hard cords overlying the Orthan's vital throat tubes. His fingers and thumb gouged deep into Kam's startled throat and choked off any cry for assistance before it could be uttered. Kam's hand swept down to the holster swung from his intricate harness and dragged his blaster from it. Thig's other hand clamped over his and for long moments they swayed there, locked together in silent deadly struggle. The fate of a world hung in the balance as Kam's other hand fought against that lone arm of Thig. The scales swung in favor of Kam. Slowly the flaring snout of his weapon tilted upward until it reached the level of Thig's waist. Thig suddenly released his grip and dragged his enemy toward him. A sudden reversal of pressure on Kam's gun hand sent the weapon swivelling about full upon its owner's thick torso. Thig's fingers pressed down upon Kam's button finger, down upon the stud set into the grip of the decomposition blaster, and Kam's muscles turned to water. He shrieked. Before Thig's eyes half of his comrade's body sloughed away into foul corruption that swiftly gave way to hardened blobs of dessicated matter. Horror for what he had done—that he had slain one of his own Horde—made his limbs move woodenly. All of his thoughts were dulled for the moment. Painfully slow, he turned his body around toward the control blister, turned around on leaden feet, to look full into the narrowed icy eyes of his commander. He saw the heavy barrel of the blaster slashing down against his skull but he could not swing a fraction of an inch out of the way. His body seemed paralyzed. This was the end, he thought as he waited stupidly for the blow to fall, the end for Ellen and the kids and all the struggling races of Earth. He would never write another cowboy yarn—they would all be dead anyhow soon. Then a thunderclap exploded against his head and he dropped endlessly toward the deck. Blows rained against his skull. He wondered if Torp would ever cease to hammer at him and turn the deadly ray of the weapon upon him. Blood throbbed and pounded with every blow.... Bam, Bam, Bam, the blood pounded in his ears. Like repeated blows of a hammer they shook his booming head. No longer was Torp above him. He was in the corner of the laboratory, a crumpled blood-smeared heap of bruised flesh and bone. He was unfettered and the blood was caked upon his skull and in his matted hair. Torp must have thought he had killed him with those savage blows upon the head. Even Torp, thought Thig ruefully, gave way to the primitive rage of his ancestors at times; but to that very bit of unconscious atavism he now owed his life. A cool-headed robot of an Orthan would have efficiently used the blaster to destroy any possibility of remaining life in his unconscious body. Thig rolled slowly over so that his eye found the door into the control room. Torp would be coming back again to dispose of their bodies through the refuse lock. Already the body of Kam was gone. He wondered why he had been left until last. Perhaps Torp wished to take cultures of his blood and tissues to determine whether a disease was responsible for his sudden madness. The cases of fragile instruments were just above his head. Association of memories brought him the flash of the heavy blaster in its rack beneath them. His hand went up and felt the welcome hardness of the weapon. He tugged it free. In a moment he was on his knees crawling across the plates of the deck toward the door. Halfway across the floor he collapsed on his face, the metal of the gun making a harsh clang. He heard the feet of Torp scuffle out of silence and a choked cry in the man's throat squalled out into a senseless whinny. Thig raised himself up on a quivering elbow and slid the black length of the blaster in front of him. His eyes sought the doorway and stared full into the glaring vacant orbs of his commander. Torp leaned there watching him, his breath gurgling brokenly through his deep-bitten lips. The clawing marks of nails, fingernails, furrowed his face and chest. He was a madman! The deadly attack of Thig; his own violent avenging of Kam's death, and now the apparent return of the man he had killed come to life had all served to jolt his rigidly trained brain from its accustomed groove. The shock had been too much for the established thought-processes of the Orthan. So Thig shot him where he stood, mercifully, before that vacant mad stare set him, too, to gibbering and shrieking. Then he stepped over the skeleton-thing that had been Torp, using the new strength that victory had given him to drive him along. He had saved a world's civilization from extinction! The thought sobered him; yet, somehow, he was pleased that he had done so. After all, it had been the Earthwoman and the children he had been thinking of while he battled Kam, a selfish desire to protect them all. He went to the desk where Torp had been writing in the ship's log and read the last few nervously scrawled lines: Planet 72-P-3 unfit for colonization. Some pernicious disease that strikes at the brain centers and causes violent insanity is existent there. Thig, just returned from a survey of the planet, went mad and destroyed Kam. In turn I was forced to slay him. But it is not ended. Already I feel the insidious virus of.... And there his writing ended abruptly. Thig nodded. That would do it. He set the automatic pilot for the planet Ortha. Unless a rogue asteroid or a comet crossed the ship's path she would return safely to Ortha with that mute warning of danger on 72-P-3. The body of Torp would help to confirm his final message. Then Thig crossed the cabin to the auxiliary life boat there, one of a half-dozen space ships in miniature nested within the great ship's hull, and cut free from the mother vessel. He flipped the drive lever, felt the thrumming of the rockets driving him from the parent ship. The sensation of free flight against his new body was strangely exhilerating and heady. It was the newest of the emotions he had experienced on Earth since that day, so many months before, when he had felt the warmness of Ellen's lips tight against his. Thig flipped the drive lever, felt the thrumming of the rockets driving him from the parent ship. He swung about to the port, watched the flaming drive-rockets of the great exploratory ship hurl it toward far-away Ortha, and there was no regret in his mind that he was not returning to the planet of his first existence. He thought of the dull greys and blacks of his planet, of the monotonous routine of existence that had once been his—and his heart thrilled to the memories of the starry nights and perfect exciting days he had spent on his three month trip over Earth. He made a brief salute to the existence he had known, turned with a tiny sigh, and his fingers made brief adjustments in the controls. The rocket-thrum deepened, and the thin whistle of tenuous air clutching the ship echoed through the hull-plates. He thought of many things in those few moments. He watched the roundness of Earth flatten out, then take on the cup-like illusion that all planets had for an incoming ship. He reduced the drive of his rockets to a mere whisper, striving to control the impatience that crowded his mind. He shivered suddenly, remembering his utter callousness the first time he had sent a space ship whipping down toward the hills and valleys below. And there was a sickness within him when he fully realized that, despite his acquired memory and traits, he was an alien from outer space. He fingered the tiny scars that had completely obliterated the slight differences in his appearance from an Earthman's, and his fingers trembled a bit, as he bent and stared through the vision port. He said a brief prayer in his heart to a God whose presence he now felt very deeply. There were tears in the depths of his eyes, then, and memories were hot, bitter pains. Earth was not far below him. As he let gravity suck him earthward, he heaved a gasp of relief. He was no longer Thig, a creature of a Horde's creation, but Lewis Terry, writer of lurid gun-smoking tales of the West. He must remember that always. He had destroyed the real Terry and now, for the rest of his life, he must make up to the dead man's family. The knowledge that Ellen's love was not really meant for him would be a knife twisting in his heart but for her sake he must endure it. Her dreams and happiness must never be shattered. The bulge of Earth was flattening out now and he could see the outlines of Long Island in the growing twilight. A new plot was growing in the brain of Lewis Terry, a yarn about a cowboy suddenly transported to another world. He smiled ironically. He had seen those other worlds. Perhaps some day he would write about them.... He was Lewis Terry! He must remember that!

Describe the setting of the story.

9

The story is set in multiple locations, including Long Island, New York, an Orthan spaceship and smaller auxiliary ship, parts of the American West, and outer space. The ship from Ortha lands on Long Island in New York, and this is where Thig captures Lewis Terry and takes him to the Orthans’ spaceship, before settling in with his family, posing as Terry. This area of Long Island is near the beach and the sound, and is described as lush and green. The Terry family lives in a small grey house that is somewhat run down. While we don’t travel out west on the Terry family vacation, we do experience bits of it in Thig’s memory, including the Grand Canyon in Arizona and unspecified desert terrain. The story then takes us back to the ship, and a small laboratory aboard the ship, and then inside a smaller ship as it heads back to Long Island.

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QUEST OF THIG By BASIL WELLS Thig of Ortha was the vanguard of the conquering "HORDE." He had blasted across trackless space to subdue a defenseless world—only to meet on Earth emotions that were more deadly than weapons. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Thig carefully smoothed the dark sand and seaweed of the lonely beach over the metal lid of the flexible ringed tunnel that linked the grubby ship from another planet with the upper air. He looked out across the heaving waters of the Sound toward Connecticut. He stared appraisingly around at the luxuriant green growth of foliage further inland; and started toward the little stretch of trees and brush, walking carefully because of the lesser gravitation. Thig was shorter than the average Earthman—although on Ortha he was well above the average in height—but his body was thick and powerfully muscled. His skull was well-shaped and large; his features were regular, perhaps a trifle oversize, and his hair and eyes were a curiously matching blend of reddish brown. Oddest of all, he wore no garments, other than the necessary belt and straps to support his rod-like weapon of white metal and his pouches for food and specimens. The Orthan entered the narrow strip of trees and crossed to the little-used highway on the other side. Here he patiently sat down to wait for an Earthman or an Earthwoman to pass. His task now was to bring a native, intact if possible, back to the carefully buried space cruiser where his two fellows and himself would drain the creature's mentality of all its knowledge. In this way they could learn whether a planet was suited for colonization by later swarms of Orthans. Already they had charted over a hundred celestial bodies but of them all only three had proven worthy of consideration. This latest planet, however, 72-P-3 on the chart, appeared to be an ideal world in every respect. Sunlight, plenty of water and a dense atmospheric envelope made of 72-P-3 a paradise among planets. The explorer from another world crouched into the concealment of a leafy shrub. A creature was approaching. Its squat body was covered with baggy strips of bluish cloth and it carried a jointed rod of metal and wood in its paw. It walked upright as did the men of Ortha. Thig's cold eyes opened a trifle wider as he stared into the thing's stupid face. It was as though he was looking into a bit of polished metal at the reflection of himself! The Earthman was opposite now and he must waste no more precious time. The mighty muscles of the Orthan sent him hurtling across the intervening space in two prodigious bounds, and his hands clamped across the mouth and neck of the stranger.... Lewis Terry was going fishing. For a week the typewriter mill that had ground out a thousand assorted yarns of the untamed West and the frigid desolation of the Northwoods had been silent. Lewis wondered if he was going stale. He had sat every day for eight hours in front of that shiny-buttoned bane of the typist, but there were no results. Feebly he had punched a key two days ago and a $ sign had appeared. He hadn't dared touch the machine since. For Mr. Terry, that hard-hitting writer of two-gun action, had never been further west of Long Island than Elizabeth, and he had promised his wife, Ellen, that he would take the three children and herself on a trailer tour of the West that very summer. Since that promise, he could not write a word. Visions of whooping red-skinned Apaches and be-chapped outlaws raiding his little trailer home kept rolling up out of his subconscious. Yet he had to write at least three novelets and a fistful of short stories in the next two weeks to finance the great adventure—or the trip was off. So Lewis left the weathered old cottage in the early dawn and headed for his tubby old boat at the landing in an attempt to work out a salable yarn.... "Hey!" he shouted as a naked man sprang out of the bushes beside the road. "What's the trouble?" Then he had no time for further speech, the massive arms of the stranger had wound around him and two hamlike hands shut off his speech and his wind. He fought futilely against trained muscles. The hand clamping his throat relaxed for a moment and hacked along the side of his head. Blackness flooded the brain of Lewis, and he knew no more. "There it is," announced Thig, dropping the limp body of the captured Earthman to the metal deck-plates. "It is a male of the species that must have built the cities we saw as we landed." "He resembles Thig," announced Kam. "But for the strange covering he wears he might be Thig." "Thig will be this creature!" announced Torp. "With a psychic relay we will transfer the Earthman's memories and meager store of knowledge to the brain of Thig! He can then go out and scout this world without arousing suspicion. While he is gone, I will take Kam and explore the two inner planets." "You are the commander," said Thig. "But I wish this beast did not wear these clumsy sheathing upon his body. On Ortha we do not hamper the use of our limbs so." "Do not question the word of your commander," growled Torp, swelling out his thick chest menacingly. "It is for the good of our people that you disguise yourself as an Earthman." "For the good of the Horde," Thig intoned almost piously as he lifted Terry's body and headed for the laboratory. Service for the Horde was all that the men of Ortha knew. Carefully cultured and brought to life in the laboratories of their Horde, they knew neither father nor mother. Affection and love were entirely lacking in their early training and later life. They were trained antlike from childhood that only the growth and power of the Horde were of any moment. Men and women alike toiled and died like unfeeling robots of flesh and bone for the Horde. The Horde was their religion, their love-life, their everything! So it was that the bodies of the Earthman and the Orthan were strapped on two parallel tables of chill metal and the twin helmets, linked to one another by the intricacies of the psychic relay, put upon their heads. For ten hours or more the droning hum of the relay sucked Terry's brain dry of knowledge. The shock upon the nervous system of the Earthman proved too violent and his heart faltered after a time and stopped completely. Twice, with subtle drugs they restored pseudo-life to his body and kept the electrical impulses throbbing from his tortured brain, but after the third suspension of life Thig removed his helmet. "There is nothing more to learn," he informed his impassive comrades. "Now, let us get on with the plastic surgery that is required. My new body must return to its barbaric household before undue attention is aroused. And when I return I will take along some of the gleaming baubles we found on the red planet—these people value them highly." An hour later, his scars and altered cartilage already healed and painless, Thig again scraped sand over the entrance to the space ship and set out along the moonlit beach toward the nearest path running inland to his home. Memory was laying the country bare about him, Terry's own childhood memories of this particular section of Long Island. Here was the place where Jake and Ted had helped him dig for the buried treasure that old 'Notch-ear' Beggs had told them so exactly about. Remembrance of that episode gave Thig an idea about the little lump of jewels in his pocket. He had found them in a chest along the beach! He was coming up on the porch now and at the sound of his foot on the sagging boards the screen door burst open and three little Earth-creatures were hugging at his legs. An odd sensation, that his acquired memories labeled as pleasure, sent a warm glow upward from around his heart. Then he saw the slender red-haired shape of a woman, the mate of the dead man he knew, and confusion struck his well-trained brain. Men had no mates on Ortha, sex had been overthrown with all the other primitive impulses of barbarism; so he was incapable of understanding the emotions that swept through his acquired memory. Unsteadily he took her in his arms and felt her warm lips pressed, trembling, against his own. That same hot wave of pulsing blood choked achingly up into his throat. "Lew, dear," Ellen was asking, "where have you been all day? I called up at the landing but you were not there. I wanted to let you know that Saddlebag Publications sent a check for $50 for "Reversed Revolvers" and three other editors asked for shorts soon." "Shoulda got a hundred bucks for that yarn," grunted Thig, and gasped. For the moment he had been Lewis Terry and not Thig! So thoroughly had he acquired the knowledge of Terry that he found himself unconsciously adopting the thinking and mannerism of the other. All the better this way, he realized—more natural. "Sorry I was late," he said, digging into his pocket for the glittering baubles, "but I was poking around on the beach where we used to hunt treasure and I found an old chest. Inside it I found nothing but a handful of these." He flashed the jewels in front of Ellen's startled eyes and she clung, unbelieving, to his arm. "Why, Lew," she gasped, "they're worth a fortune! We can buy that new trailer now and have a rebuilt motor in the car. We can go west right away.... Hollywood, the Grand Canyon, cowboys!" "Uh huh," agreed the pseudo Lewis, memories of the ferocious savages and gunmen of his stories rendering him acutely unhappy. Sincerely he hoped that the west had reformed. "I saved some kraut and weiners," Ellen said. "Get washed up while I'm warming them up. Kids ate all the bread so I had to borrow some from the Eskoes. Want coffee, too?" "Mmmmmm," came from the depths of the chipped white wash-basin. "Home again," whispered Ellen as she stood beside Thig twelve weeks later and gazed tearfully at the weathered little gray house. She knelt beside the front stoop and reached for the key hidden beneath it. "The west was wonderful; tremendous, vast and beautiful," she went on as they climbed the steps, "but nowhere was there any place as beautiful as our own little strip of sky and water." Thig sank into a dusty old swing that hung on creaking chains from the exposed rafters of the porch roof. He looked down at the dusty gray car and the bulbous silvery bulk of the trailer that had been their living quarters for almost three months. Strange thoughts were afloat in the chaos of his cool Orthan brain. Tonight or tomorrow night at the latest he must contact his two fellows and report that Earth was a planetary paradise. No other world, including Ortha, was so well-favored and rich. An expeditionary force to wipe the grotesque civilizations of Earth out of existence would, of course, be necessary before the first units of new Hordes could be landed. And there Thig balked. Why must they destroy these people, imperfect though their civilization might be, to make room for the Hordes? Thig tried to tell himself that it was the transmitted thoughts of the dead Earthman that made him feel so, but he was not too sure. For three months he had lived with people who loved, hated, wept and sacrificed for reasons that he had never known existed. He had learned the heady glory of thinking for himself and making his own decisions. He had experienced the primitive joy of matching his wits and tongue against the wits of other unpredictable human beings. There was no abrupt division of men and women into definite classes of endeavor. A laborer thought the same thoughts that a governor might think. Uncertainty added zest to every day's life. The Orthan had come to question the sole devotion of the individual to the Horde to the exclusion of all other interests. What, he wondered, would one new world—or a hundred—populated by the Hordes add to the progress of humanity? For a hundred thousand years the Orthan civilization had remained static, its energies directed into certain well-defined channels. They were mindless bees maintaining their vast mechanical hives. There was that moment on the brink of the Grand Canyon when Ellen had caught his arm breathlessly at all the beauty spread away there beneath them. There were mornings in the desert when the sun painted in lurid red the peaks above the harsh black-and-whites of the sagebrush and cactus slopes. There was the little boy, his body burning with fever, who nestled trustingly against his tense man's body and slept—the son of Ellen and the man he had destroyed. Thig groaned. He was a weakling to let sentimentality so get the better of his judgment. He would go now to the space ship and urge them to blast off for Ortha. He sprang off the porch and strode away down the road toward the beach. The children ran to him; wanted to go along. He sent them away harshly but they smiled and waved their brown little hands. Ellen came to the door and called after him. "Hurry home, dear," she said. "I'll have a bite ready in about an hour." He dared not say anything, for his voice would have broken and she would have known something was wrong. She was a very wise sort of person when something was troubling him. He waved his stubby paw of a hand to show that he had heard, and blindly hurried toward the Sound. Oddly enough, as he hurried away along the narrow path through the autumn woods, his mind busied itself with a new epic of the west that lived no longer. He mentally titled it: "Rustlers' Riot" and blocked in the outlines of his plot. One section of his brain was that of the careless author of gunslinging yarns, a section that seemed to be sapping the life from his own brain. He knew that the story would never be written, but he toyed with the idea. So far had Thig the emotionless, robot-being from Ortha drifted from the unquestioning worship of the Horde! "You have done well," announced Torp when Thig had completed his report on the resources and temperatures of various sections of Terra. "We now have located three worlds fit for colonization and so we will return to Ortha at once. "I will recommend the conquest of this planet, 72-P-3 at once and the complete destruction of all biped life upon it. The mental aberrations of the barbaric natives might lead to endless complications if they were permitted to exist outside our ordered way of life. I imagine that three circuits of the planet about its primary should prove sufficient for the purposes of complete liquidation." "But why," asked Thig slowly, "could we not disarm all the natives and exile them on one of the less desirable continents, Antarctica for example or Siberia? They are primitive humans even as our race was once a race of primitives. It is not our duty to help to attain our own degree of knowledge and comfort?" "Only the good of the Horde matters!" shouted Torp angrily. "Shall a race of feeble-witted beasts, such as these Earthmen, stand in the way of a superior race? We want their world, and so we will take it. The Law of the Horde states that all the universe is ours for the taking." "Let us get back to Ortha at once, then," gritted out Thig savagely. "Never again do I wish to set foot upon the soil of this mad planet. There are forces at work upon Earth that we of Ortha have long forgotten." "Check the blood of Thig for disease, Kam," ordered Torp shortly. "His words are highly irrational. Some form of fever perhaps native to this world. While you examine him I will blast off for Ortha." Thig followed Kam into the tiny laboratory and found a seat beside the squat scientist's desk. His eyes roamed over the familiar instruments and gauges, each in its own precise position in the cases along the walls. His gaze lingered longest on the stubby black ugliness of a decomposition blaster in its rack close to the deck. A blast of the invisible radiations from that weapon's hot throat and flesh or vegetable fiber rotted into flaky ashes. The ship trembled beneath their feet; it tore free from the feeble clutch of the sand about it, and they were rocketing skyward. Thig's broad fingers bit deep into the unyielding metal of his chair. Suddenly he knew that he must go back to Earth, back to Ellen and the children of the man he had helped destroy. He loved Ellen, and nothing must stand between them! The Hordes of Ortha must find some other world, an empty world—this planet was not for them. "Turn back!" he cried wildly. "I must go back to Earth. There is a woman there, helpless and alone, who needs me! The Horde does not need this planet." Kam eyed him coldly and lifted a shining hypodermic syringe from its case. He approached Thig warily, aware that disease often made a maniac of the finest members of the Horde. "No human being is more important than the Horde," he stated baldly. "This woman of whom you speak is merely one unit of the millions we must eliminate for the good of the Horde." Then it was that Thig went berserk. His fists slashed into the thick jaw of the scientist and his fingers ripped at the hard cords overlying the Orthan's vital throat tubes. His fingers and thumb gouged deep into Kam's startled throat and choked off any cry for assistance before it could be uttered. Kam's hand swept down to the holster swung from his intricate harness and dragged his blaster from it. Thig's other hand clamped over his and for long moments they swayed there, locked together in silent deadly struggle. The fate of a world hung in the balance as Kam's other hand fought against that lone arm of Thig. The scales swung in favor of Kam. Slowly the flaring snout of his weapon tilted upward until it reached the level of Thig's waist. Thig suddenly released his grip and dragged his enemy toward him. A sudden reversal of pressure on Kam's gun hand sent the weapon swivelling about full upon its owner's thick torso. Thig's fingers pressed down upon Kam's button finger, down upon the stud set into the grip of the decomposition blaster, and Kam's muscles turned to water. He shrieked. Before Thig's eyes half of his comrade's body sloughed away into foul corruption that swiftly gave way to hardened blobs of dessicated matter. Horror for what he had done—that he had slain one of his own Horde—made his limbs move woodenly. All of his thoughts were dulled for the moment. Painfully slow, he turned his body around toward the control blister, turned around on leaden feet, to look full into the narrowed icy eyes of his commander. He saw the heavy barrel of the blaster slashing down against his skull but he could not swing a fraction of an inch out of the way. His body seemed paralyzed. This was the end, he thought as he waited stupidly for the blow to fall, the end for Ellen and the kids and all the struggling races of Earth. He would never write another cowboy yarn—they would all be dead anyhow soon. Then a thunderclap exploded against his head and he dropped endlessly toward the deck. Blows rained against his skull. He wondered if Torp would ever cease to hammer at him and turn the deadly ray of the weapon upon him. Blood throbbed and pounded with every blow.... Bam, Bam, Bam, the blood pounded in his ears. Like repeated blows of a hammer they shook his booming head. No longer was Torp above him. He was in the corner of the laboratory, a crumpled blood-smeared heap of bruised flesh and bone. He was unfettered and the blood was caked upon his skull and in his matted hair. Torp must have thought he had killed him with those savage blows upon the head. Even Torp, thought Thig ruefully, gave way to the primitive rage of his ancestors at times; but to that very bit of unconscious atavism he now owed his life. A cool-headed robot of an Orthan would have efficiently used the blaster to destroy any possibility of remaining life in his unconscious body. Thig rolled slowly over so that his eye found the door into the control room. Torp would be coming back again to dispose of their bodies through the refuse lock. Already the body of Kam was gone. He wondered why he had been left until last. Perhaps Torp wished to take cultures of his blood and tissues to determine whether a disease was responsible for his sudden madness. The cases of fragile instruments were just above his head. Association of memories brought him the flash of the heavy blaster in its rack beneath them. His hand went up and felt the welcome hardness of the weapon. He tugged it free. In a moment he was on his knees crawling across the plates of the deck toward the door. Halfway across the floor he collapsed on his face, the metal of the gun making a harsh clang. He heard the feet of Torp scuffle out of silence and a choked cry in the man's throat squalled out into a senseless whinny. Thig raised himself up on a quivering elbow and slid the black length of the blaster in front of him. His eyes sought the doorway and stared full into the glaring vacant orbs of his commander. Torp leaned there watching him, his breath gurgling brokenly through his deep-bitten lips. The clawing marks of nails, fingernails, furrowed his face and chest. He was a madman! The deadly attack of Thig; his own violent avenging of Kam's death, and now the apparent return of the man he had killed come to life had all served to jolt his rigidly trained brain from its accustomed groove. The shock had been too much for the established thought-processes of the Orthan. So Thig shot him where he stood, mercifully, before that vacant mad stare set him, too, to gibbering and shrieking. Then he stepped over the skeleton-thing that had been Torp, using the new strength that victory had given him to drive him along. He had saved a world's civilization from extinction! The thought sobered him; yet, somehow, he was pleased that he had done so. After all, it had been the Earthwoman and the children he had been thinking of while he battled Kam, a selfish desire to protect them all. He went to the desk where Torp had been writing in the ship's log and read the last few nervously scrawled lines: Planet 72-P-3 unfit for colonization. Some pernicious disease that strikes at the brain centers and causes violent insanity is existent there. Thig, just returned from a survey of the planet, went mad and destroyed Kam. In turn I was forced to slay him. But it is not ended. Already I feel the insidious virus of.... And there his writing ended abruptly. Thig nodded. That would do it. He set the automatic pilot for the planet Ortha. Unless a rogue asteroid or a comet crossed the ship's path she would return safely to Ortha with that mute warning of danger on 72-P-3. The body of Torp would help to confirm his final message. Then Thig crossed the cabin to the auxiliary life boat there, one of a half-dozen space ships in miniature nested within the great ship's hull, and cut free from the mother vessel. He flipped the drive lever, felt the thrumming of the rockets driving him from the parent ship. The sensation of free flight against his new body was strangely exhilerating and heady. It was the newest of the emotions he had experienced on Earth since that day, so many months before, when he had felt the warmness of Ellen's lips tight against his. Thig flipped the drive lever, felt the thrumming of the rockets driving him from the parent ship. He swung about to the port, watched the flaming drive-rockets of the great exploratory ship hurl it toward far-away Ortha, and there was no regret in his mind that he was not returning to the planet of his first existence. He thought of the dull greys and blacks of his planet, of the monotonous routine of existence that had once been his—and his heart thrilled to the memories of the starry nights and perfect exciting days he had spent on his three month trip over Earth. He made a brief salute to the existence he had known, turned with a tiny sigh, and his fingers made brief adjustments in the controls. The rocket-thrum deepened, and the thin whistle of tenuous air clutching the ship echoed through the hull-plates. He thought of many things in those few moments. He watched the roundness of Earth flatten out, then take on the cup-like illusion that all planets had for an incoming ship. He reduced the drive of his rockets to a mere whisper, striving to control the impatience that crowded his mind. He shivered suddenly, remembering his utter callousness the first time he had sent a space ship whipping down toward the hills and valleys below. And there was a sickness within him when he fully realized that, despite his acquired memory and traits, he was an alien from outer space. He fingered the tiny scars that had completely obliterated the slight differences in his appearance from an Earthman's, and his fingers trembled a bit, as he bent and stared through the vision port. He said a brief prayer in his heart to a God whose presence he now felt very deeply. There were tears in the depths of his eyes, then, and memories were hot, bitter pains. Earth was not far below him. As he let gravity suck him earthward, he heaved a gasp of relief. He was no longer Thig, a creature of a Horde's creation, but Lewis Terry, writer of lurid gun-smoking tales of the West. He must remember that always. He had destroyed the real Terry and now, for the rest of his life, he must make up to the dead man's family. The knowledge that Ellen's love was not really meant for him would be a knife twisting in his heart but for her sake he must endure it. Her dreams and happiness must never be shattered. The bulge of Earth was flattening out now and he could see the outlines of Long Island in the growing twilight. A new plot was growing in the brain of Lewis Terry, a yarn about a cowboy suddenly transported to another world. He smiled ironically. He had seen those other worlds. Perhaps some day he would write about them.... He was Lewis Terry! He must remember that!

Describe the setting of the story.

8

Lew’s family lives near a beach on Long Island. When the story begins, Thig emerges from his spaceship, which is buried below this beach. He sees dense, green brush beyond the beach running along a highway with little traffic. This is where he chooses to hide and waits to overtake Lew. Thig’s interactions with Kam and Torp take place on the spaceship below the beach surface; this is also where they kill Lew during the brain transfer with Thig. Thig reunites as Lew with Ellen and their children at their beach home and joins them on an epic, three-month journey out West where he sees the Grand Canyon and is overwhelmed by the beauty of the desert with its sagebrush and cacti and variety of colors. Later, Torp charts a path back to Ortha, where they will report their findings. Thig kills Torp and Kam aboard the spaceship, and then he commandeers an escape vessel to make his way back to Earth and back to Ellen and the children.

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QUEST OF THIG By BASIL WELLS Thig of Ortha was the vanguard of the conquering "HORDE." He had blasted across trackless space to subdue a defenseless world—only to meet on Earth emotions that were more deadly than weapons. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Thig carefully smoothed the dark sand and seaweed of the lonely beach over the metal lid of the flexible ringed tunnel that linked the grubby ship from another planet with the upper air. He looked out across the heaving waters of the Sound toward Connecticut. He stared appraisingly around at the luxuriant green growth of foliage further inland; and started toward the little stretch of trees and brush, walking carefully because of the lesser gravitation. Thig was shorter than the average Earthman—although on Ortha he was well above the average in height—but his body was thick and powerfully muscled. His skull was well-shaped and large; his features were regular, perhaps a trifle oversize, and his hair and eyes were a curiously matching blend of reddish brown. Oddest of all, he wore no garments, other than the necessary belt and straps to support his rod-like weapon of white metal and his pouches for food and specimens. The Orthan entered the narrow strip of trees and crossed to the little-used highway on the other side. Here he patiently sat down to wait for an Earthman or an Earthwoman to pass. His task now was to bring a native, intact if possible, back to the carefully buried space cruiser where his two fellows and himself would drain the creature's mentality of all its knowledge. In this way they could learn whether a planet was suited for colonization by later swarms of Orthans. Already they had charted over a hundred celestial bodies but of them all only three had proven worthy of consideration. This latest planet, however, 72-P-3 on the chart, appeared to be an ideal world in every respect. Sunlight, plenty of water and a dense atmospheric envelope made of 72-P-3 a paradise among planets. The explorer from another world crouched into the concealment of a leafy shrub. A creature was approaching. Its squat body was covered with baggy strips of bluish cloth and it carried a jointed rod of metal and wood in its paw. It walked upright as did the men of Ortha. Thig's cold eyes opened a trifle wider as he stared into the thing's stupid face. It was as though he was looking into a bit of polished metal at the reflection of himself! The Earthman was opposite now and he must waste no more precious time. The mighty muscles of the Orthan sent him hurtling across the intervening space in two prodigious bounds, and his hands clamped across the mouth and neck of the stranger.... Lewis Terry was going fishing. For a week the typewriter mill that had ground out a thousand assorted yarns of the untamed West and the frigid desolation of the Northwoods had been silent. Lewis wondered if he was going stale. He had sat every day for eight hours in front of that shiny-buttoned bane of the typist, but there were no results. Feebly he had punched a key two days ago and a $ sign had appeared. He hadn't dared touch the machine since. For Mr. Terry, that hard-hitting writer of two-gun action, had never been further west of Long Island than Elizabeth, and he had promised his wife, Ellen, that he would take the three children and herself on a trailer tour of the West that very summer. Since that promise, he could not write a word. Visions of whooping red-skinned Apaches and be-chapped outlaws raiding his little trailer home kept rolling up out of his subconscious. Yet he had to write at least three novelets and a fistful of short stories in the next two weeks to finance the great adventure—or the trip was off. So Lewis left the weathered old cottage in the early dawn and headed for his tubby old boat at the landing in an attempt to work out a salable yarn.... "Hey!" he shouted as a naked man sprang out of the bushes beside the road. "What's the trouble?" Then he had no time for further speech, the massive arms of the stranger had wound around him and two hamlike hands shut off his speech and his wind. He fought futilely against trained muscles. The hand clamping his throat relaxed for a moment and hacked along the side of his head. Blackness flooded the brain of Lewis, and he knew no more. "There it is," announced Thig, dropping the limp body of the captured Earthman to the metal deck-plates. "It is a male of the species that must have built the cities we saw as we landed." "He resembles Thig," announced Kam. "But for the strange covering he wears he might be Thig." "Thig will be this creature!" announced Torp. "With a psychic relay we will transfer the Earthman's memories and meager store of knowledge to the brain of Thig! He can then go out and scout this world without arousing suspicion. While he is gone, I will take Kam and explore the two inner planets." "You are the commander," said Thig. "But I wish this beast did not wear these clumsy sheathing upon his body. On Ortha we do not hamper the use of our limbs so." "Do not question the word of your commander," growled Torp, swelling out his thick chest menacingly. "It is for the good of our people that you disguise yourself as an Earthman." "For the good of the Horde," Thig intoned almost piously as he lifted Terry's body and headed for the laboratory. Service for the Horde was all that the men of Ortha knew. Carefully cultured and brought to life in the laboratories of their Horde, they knew neither father nor mother. Affection and love were entirely lacking in their early training and later life. They were trained antlike from childhood that only the growth and power of the Horde were of any moment. Men and women alike toiled and died like unfeeling robots of flesh and bone for the Horde. The Horde was their religion, their love-life, their everything! So it was that the bodies of the Earthman and the Orthan were strapped on two parallel tables of chill metal and the twin helmets, linked to one another by the intricacies of the psychic relay, put upon their heads. For ten hours or more the droning hum of the relay sucked Terry's brain dry of knowledge. The shock upon the nervous system of the Earthman proved too violent and his heart faltered after a time and stopped completely. Twice, with subtle drugs they restored pseudo-life to his body and kept the electrical impulses throbbing from his tortured brain, but after the third suspension of life Thig removed his helmet. "There is nothing more to learn," he informed his impassive comrades. "Now, let us get on with the plastic surgery that is required. My new body must return to its barbaric household before undue attention is aroused. And when I return I will take along some of the gleaming baubles we found on the red planet—these people value them highly." An hour later, his scars and altered cartilage already healed and painless, Thig again scraped sand over the entrance to the space ship and set out along the moonlit beach toward the nearest path running inland to his home. Memory was laying the country bare about him, Terry's own childhood memories of this particular section of Long Island. Here was the place where Jake and Ted had helped him dig for the buried treasure that old 'Notch-ear' Beggs had told them so exactly about. Remembrance of that episode gave Thig an idea about the little lump of jewels in his pocket. He had found them in a chest along the beach! He was coming up on the porch now and at the sound of his foot on the sagging boards the screen door burst open and three little Earth-creatures were hugging at his legs. An odd sensation, that his acquired memories labeled as pleasure, sent a warm glow upward from around his heart. Then he saw the slender red-haired shape of a woman, the mate of the dead man he knew, and confusion struck his well-trained brain. Men had no mates on Ortha, sex had been overthrown with all the other primitive impulses of barbarism; so he was incapable of understanding the emotions that swept through his acquired memory. Unsteadily he took her in his arms and felt her warm lips pressed, trembling, against his own. That same hot wave of pulsing blood choked achingly up into his throat. "Lew, dear," Ellen was asking, "where have you been all day? I called up at the landing but you were not there. I wanted to let you know that Saddlebag Publications sent a check for $50 for "Reversed Revolvers" and three other editors asked for shorts soon." "Shoulda got a hundred bucks for that yarn," grunted Thig, and gasped. For the moment he had been Lewis Terry and not Thig! So thoroughly had he acquired the knowledge of Terry that he found himself unconsciously adopting the thinking and mannerism of the other. All the better this way, he realized—more natural. "Sorry I was late," he said, digging into his pocket for the glittering baubles, "but I was poking around on the beach where we used to hunt treasure and I found an old chest. Inside it I found nothing but a handful of these." He flashed the jewels in front of Ellen's startled eyes and she clung, unbelieving, to his arm. "Why, Lew," she gasped, "they're worth a fortune! We can buy that new trailer now and have a rebuilt motor in the car. We can go west right away.... Hollywood, the Grand Canyon, cowboys!" "Uh huh," agreed the pseudo Lewis, memories of the ferocious savages and gunmen of his stories rendering him acutely unhappy. Sincerely he hoped that the west had reformed. "I saved some kraut and weiners," Ellen said. "Get washed up while I'm warming them up. Kids ate all the bread so I had to borrow some from the Eskoes. Want coffee, too?" "Mmmmmm," came from the depths of the chipped white wash-basin. "Home again," whispered Ellen as she stood beside Thig twelve weeks later and gazed tearfully at the weathered little gray house. She knelt beside the front stoop and reached for the key hidden beneath it. "The west was wonderful; tremendous, vast and beautiful," she went on as they climbed the steps, "but nowhere was there any place as beautiful as our own little strip of sky and water." Thig sank into a dusty old swing that hung on creaking chains from the exposed rafters of the porch roof. He looked down at the dusty gray car and the bulbous silvery bulk of the trailer that had been their living quarters for almost three months. Strange thoughts were afloat in the chaos of his cool Orthan brain. Tonight or tomorrow night at the latest he must contact his two fellows and report that Earth was a planetary paradise. No other world, including Ortha, was so well-favored and rich. An expeditionary force to wipe the grotesque civilizations of Earth out of existence would, of course, be necessary before the first units of new Hordes could be landed. And there Thig balked. Why must they destroy these people, imperfect though their civilization might be, to make room for the Hordes? Thig tried to tell himself that it was the transmitted thoughts of the dead Earthman that made him feel so, but he was not too sure. For three months he had lived with people who loved, hated, wept and sacrificed for reasons that he had never known existed. He had learned the heady glory of thinking for himself and making his own decisions. He had experienced the primitive joy of matching his wits and tongue against the wits of other unpredictable human beings. There was no abrupt division of men and women into definite classes of endeavor. A laborer thought the same thoughts that a governor might think. Uncertainty added zest to every day's life. The Orthan had come to question the sole devotion of the individual to the Horde to the exclusion of all other interests. What, he wondered, would one new world—or a hundred—populated by the Hordes add to the progress of humanity? For a hundred thousand years the Orthan civilization had remained static, its energies directed into certain well-defined channels. They were mindless bees maintaining their vast mechanical hives. There was that moment on the brink of the Grand Canyon when Ellen had caught his arm breathlessly at all the beauty spread away there beneath them. There were mornings in the desert when the sun painted in lurid red the peaks above the harsh black-and-whites of the sagebrush and cactus slopes. There was the little boy, his body burning with fever, who nestled trustingly against his tense man's body and slept—the son of Ellen and the man he had destroyed. Thig groaned. He was a weakling to let sentimentality so get the better of his judgment. He would go now to the space ship and urge them to blast off for Ortha. He sprang off the porch and strode away down the road toward the beach. The children ran to him; wanted to go along. He sent them away harshly but they smiled and waved their brown little hands. Ellen came to the door and called after him. "Hurry home, dear," she said. "I'll have a bite ready in about an hour." He dared not say anything, for his voice would have broken and she would have known something was wrong. She was a very wise sort of person when something was troubling him. He waved his stubby paw of a hand to show that he had heard, and blindly hurried toward the Sound. Oddly enough, as he hurried away along the narrow path through the autumn woods, his mind busied itself with a new epic of the west that lived no longer. He mentally titled it: "Rustlers' Riot" and blocked in the outlines of his plot. One section of his brain was that of the careless author of gunslinging yarns, a section that seemed to be sapping the life from his own brain. He knew that the story would never be written, but he toyed with the idea. So far had Thig the emotionless, robot-being from Ortha drifted from the unquestioning worship of the Horde! "You have done well," announced Torp when Thig had completed his report on the resources and temperatures of various sections of Terra. "We now have located three worlds fit for colonization and so we will return to Ortha at once. "I will recommend the conquest of this planet, 72-P-3 at once and the complete destruction of all biped life upon it. The mental aberrations of the barbaric natives might lead to endless complications if they were permitted to exist outside our ordered way of life. I imagine that three circuits of the planet about its primary should prove sufficient for the purposes of complete liquidation." "But why," asked Thig slowly, "could we not disarm all the natives and exile them on one of the less desirable continents, Antarctica for example or Siberia? They are primitive humans even as our race was once a race of primitives. It is not our duty to help to attain our own degree of knowledge and comfort?" "Only the good of the Horde matters!" shouted Torp angrily. "Shall a race of feeble-witted beasts, such as these Earthmen, stand in the way of a superior race? We want their world, and so we will take it. The Law of the Horde states that all the universe is ours for the taking." "Let us get back to Ortha at once, then," gritted out Thig savagely. "Never again do I wish to set foot upon the soil of this mad planet. There are forces at work upon Earth that we of Ortha have long forgotten." "Check the blood of Thig for disease, Kam," ordered Torp shortly. "His words are highly irrational. Some form of fever perhaps native to this world. While you examine him I will blast off for Ortha." Thig followed Kam into the tiny laboratory and found a seat beside the squat scientist's desk. His eyes roamed over the familiar instruments and gauges, each in its own precise position in the cases along the walls. His gaze lingered longest on the stubby black ugliness of a decomposition blaster in its rack close to the deck. A blast of the invisible radiations from that weapon's hot throat and flesh or vegetable fiber rotted into flaky ashes. The ship trembled beneath their feet; it tore free from the feeble clutch of the sand about it, and they were rocketing skyward. Thig's broad fingers bit deep into the unyielding metal of his chair. Suddenly he knew that he must go back to Earth, back to Ellen and the children of the man he had helped destroy. He loved Ellen, and nothing must stand between them! The Hordes of Ortha must find some other world, an empty world—this planet was not for them. "Turn back!" he cried wildly. "I must go back to Earth. There is a woman there, helpless and alone, who needs me! The Horde does not need this planet." Kam eyed him coldly and lifted a shining hypodermic syringe from its case. He approached Thig warily, aware that disease often made a maniac of the finest members of the Horde. "No human being is more important than the Horde," he stated baldly. "This woman of whom you speak is merely one unit of the millions we must eliminate for the good of the Horde." Then it was that Thig went berserk. His fists slashed into the thick jaw of the scientist and his fingers ripped at the hard cords overlying the Orthan's vital throat tubes. His fingers and thumb gouged deep into Kam's startled throat and choked off any cry for assistance before it could be uttered. Kam's hand swept down to the holster swung from his intricate harness and dragged his blaster from it. Thig's other hand clamped over his and for long moments they swayed there, locked together in silent deadly struggle. The fate of a world hung in the balance as Kam's other hand fought against that lone arm of Thig. The scales swung in favor of Kam. Slowly the flaring snout of his weapon tilted upward until it reached the level of Thig's waist. Thig suddenly released his grip and dragged his enemy toward him. A sudden reversal of pressure on Kam's gun hand sent the weapon swivelling about full upon its owner's thick torso. Thig's fingers pressed down upon Kam's button finger, down upon the stud set into the grip of the decomposition blaster, and Kam's muscles turned to water. He shrieked. Before Thig's eyes half of his comrade's body sloughed away into foul corruption that swiftly gave way to hardened blobs of dessicated matter. Horror for what he had done—that he had slain one of his own Horde—made his limbs move woodenly. All of his thoughts were dulled for the moment. Painfully slow, he turned his body around toward the control blister, turned around on leaden feet, to look full into the narrowed icy eyes of his commander. He saw the heavy barrel of the blaster slashing down against his skull but he could not swing a fraction of an inch out of the way. His body seemed paralyzed. This was the end, he thought as he waited stupidly for the blow to fall, the end for Ellen and the kids and all the struggling races of Earth. He would never write another cowboy yarn—they would all be dead anyhow soon. Then a thunderclap exploded against his head and he dropped endlessly toward the deck. Blows rained against his skull. He wondered if Torp would ever cease to hammer at him and turn the deadly ray of the weapon upon him. Blood throbbed and pounded with every blow.... Bam, Bam, Bam, the blood pounded in his ears. Like repeated blows of a hammer they shook his booming head. No longer was Torp above him. He was in the corner of the laboratory, a crumpled blood-smeared heap of bruised flesh and bone. He was unfettered and the blood was caked upon his skull and in his matted hair. Torp must have thought he had killed him with those savage blows upon the head. Even Torp, thought Thig ruefully, gave way to the primitive rage of his ancestors at times; but to that very bit of unconscious atavism he now owed his life. A cool-headed robot of an Orthan would have efficiently used the blaster to destroy any possibility of remaining life in his unconscious body. Thig rolled slowly over so that his eye found the door into the control room. Torp would be coming back again to dispose of their bodies through the refuse lock. Already the body of Kam was gone. He wondered why he had been left until last. Perhaps Torp wished to take cultures of his blood and tissues to determine whether a disease was responsible for his sudden madness. The cases of fragile instruments were just above his head. Association of memories brought him the flash of the heavy blaster in its rack beneath them. His hand went up and felt the welcome hardness of the weapon. He tugged it free. In a moment he was on his knees crawling across the plates of the deck toward the door. Halfway across the floor he collapsed on his face, the metal of the gun making a harsh clang. He heard the feet of Torp scuffle out of silence and a choked cry in the man's throat squalled out into a senseless whinny. Thig raised himself up on a quivering elbow and slid the black length of the blaster in front of him. His eyes sought the doorway and stared full into the glaring vacant orbs of his commander. Torp leaned there watching him, his breath gurgling brokenly through his deep-bitten lips. The clawing marks of nails, fingernails, furrowed his face and chest. He was a madman! The deadly attack of Thig; his own violent avenging of Kam's death, and now the apparent return of the man he had killed come to life had all served to jolt his rigidly trained brain from its accustomed groove. The shock had been too much for the established thought-processes of the Orthan. So Thig shot him where he stood, mercifully, before that vacant mad stare set him, too, to gibbering and shrieking. Then he stepped over the skeleton-thing that had been Torp, using the new strength that victory had given him to drive him along. He had saved a world's civilization from extinction! The thought sobered him; yet, somehow, he was pleased that he had done so. After all, it had been the Earthwoman and the children he had been thinking of while he battled Kam, a selfish desire to protect them all. He went to the desk where Torp had been writing in the ship's log and read the last few nervously scrawled lines: Planet 72-P-3 unfit for colonization. Some pernicious disease that strikes at the brain centers and causes violent insanity is existent there. Thig, just returned from a survey of the planet, went mad and destroyed Kam. In turn I was forced to slay him. But it is not ended. Already I feel the insidious virus of.... And there his writing ended abruptly. Thig nodded. That would do it. He set the automatic pilot for the planet Ortha. Unless a rogue asteroid or a comet crossed the ship's path she would return safely to Ortha with that mute warning of danger on 72-P-3. The body of Torp would help to confirm his final message. Then Thig crossed the cabin to the auxiliary life boat there, one of a half-dozen space ships in miniature nested within the great ship's hull, and cut free from the mother vessel. He flipped the drive lever, felt the thrumming of the rockets driving him from the parent ship. The sensation of free flight against his new body was strangely exhilerating and heady. It was the newest of the emotions he had experienced on Earth since that day, so many months before, when he had felt the warmness of Ellen's lips tight against his. Thig flipped the drive lever, felt the thrumming of the rockets driving him from the parent ship. He swung about to the port, watched the flaming drive-rockets of the great exploratory ship hurl it toward far-away Ortha, and there was no regret in his mind that he was not returning to the planet of his first existence. He thought of the dull greys and blacks of his planet, of the monotonous routine of existence that had once been his—and his heart thrilled to the memories of the starry nights and perfect exciting days he had spent on his three month trip over Earth. He made a brief salute to the existence he had known, turned with a tiny sigh, and his fingers made brief adjustments in the controls. The rocket-thrum deepened, and the thin whistle of tenuous air clutching the ship echoed through the hull-plates. He thought of many things in those few moments. He watched the roundness of Earth flatten out, then take on the cup-like illusion that all planets had for an incoming ship. He reduced the drive of his rockets to a mere whisper, striving to control the impatience that crowded his mind. He shivered suddenly, remembering his utter callousness the first time he had sent a space ship whipping down toward the hills and valleys below. And there was a sickness within him when he fully realized that, despite his acquired memory and traits, he was an alien from outer space. He fingered the tiny scars that had completely obliterated the slight differences in his appearance from an Earthman's, and his fingers trembled a bit, as he bent and stared through the vision port. He said a brief prayer in his heart to a God whose presence he now felt very deeply. There were tears in the depths of his eyes, then, and memories were hot, bitter pains. Earth was not far below him. As he let gravity suck him earthward, he heaved a gasp of relief. He was no longer Thig, a creature of a Horde's creation, but Lewis Terry, writer of lurid gun-smoking tales of the West. He must remember that always. He had destroyed the real Terry and now, for the rest of his life, he must make up to the dead man's family. The knowledge that Ellen's love was not really meant for him would be a knife twisting in his heart but for her sake he must endure it. Her dreams and happiness must never be shattered. The bulge of Earth was flattening out now and he could see the outlines of Long Island in the growing twilight. A new plot was growing in the brain of Lewis Terry, a yarn about a cowboy suddenly transported to another world. He smiled ironically. He had seen those other worlds. Perhaps some day he would write about them.... He was Lewis Terry! He must remember that!

Describe the setting of the story.

1

Most of the story, The Quest of Thig, takes place on Long Island. When Thig first appears on Earth, he is standing in the seaweed and sand, looking out at the Long Island Sound. There are trees and lots of greenery along the shoreline. He notes that this planet appears to be perfect for the Orthans because it has sunlight, lots of water, and a dense atmosphere. Terry’s little gray house has a dilapidated front porch and a screen door. There is an old swing that creaks when it’s used. The family owns a gray car and a trailer. Ellen makes simple meals for her family in their kitchen. During the family’s trip out West, they visit the Grand Canyon where they see red dunes in the desert and sagebrush and cacti. The other setting in the story is the Orthans’ spaceship. When Thig takes Terry’s body back to his spaceship to take over his body and mind, there are two parallel metal tables in the operation room. Both Thig and Terry’s body wear helmets to transfer the information from one to the other. Later in the story, Thig is taken to the laboratory on the ship to get his blood checked for a disease. The lab is neatly set up with instruments hanging from the wall and weapons hanging from the ceiling. There is also a control room on board. The space ship also has six auxiliary miniature spaceships nested inside the larger vessel.

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QUEST OF THIG By BASIL WELLS Thig of Ortha was the vanguard of the conquering "HORDE." He had blasted across trackless space to subdue a defenseless world—only to meet on Earth emotions that were more deadly than weapons. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Thig carefully smoothed the dark sand and seaweed of the lonely beach over the metal lid of the flexible ringed tunnel that linked the grubby ship from another planet with the upper air. He looked out across the heaving waters of the Sound toward Connecticut. He stared appraisingly around at the luxuriant green growth of foliage further inland; and started toward the little stretch of trees and brush, walking carefully because of the lesser gravitation. Thig was shorter than the average Earthman—although on Ortha he was well above the average in height—but his body was thick and powerfully muscled. His skull was well-shaped and large; his features were regular, perhaps a trifle oversize, and his hair and eyes were a curiously matching blend of reddish brown. Oddest of all, he wore no garments, other than the necessary belt and straps to support his rod-like weapon of white metal and his pouches for food and specimens. The Orthan entered the narrow strip of trees and crossed to the little-used highway on the other side. Here he patiently sat down to wait for an Earthman or an Earthwoman to pass. His task now was to bring a native, intact if possible, back to the carefully buried space cruiser where his two fellows and himself would drain the creature's mentality of all its knowledge. In this way they could learn whether a planet was suited for colonization by later swarms of Orthans. Already they had charted over a hundred celestial bodies but of them all only three had proven worthy of consideration. This latest planet, however, 72-P-3 on the chart, appeared to be an ideal world in every respect. Sunlight, plenty of water and a dense atmospheric envelope made of 72-P-3 a paradise among planets. The explorer from another world crouched into the concealment of a leafy shrub. A creature was approaching. Its squat body was covered with baggy strips of bluish cloth and it carried a jointed rod of metal and wood in its paw. It walked upright as did the men of Ortha. Thig's cold eyes opened a trifle wider as he stared into the thing's stupid face. It was as though he was looking into a bit of polished metal at the reflection of himself! The Earthman was opposite now and he must waste no more precious time. The mighty muscles of the Orthan sent him hurtling across the intervening space in two prodigious bounds, and his hands clamped across the mouth and neck of the stranger.... Lewis Terry was going fishing. For a week the typewriter mill that had ground out a thousand assorted yarns of the untamed West and the frigid desolation of the Northwoods had been silent. Lewis wondered if he was going stale. He had sat every day for eight hours in front of that shiny-buttoned bane of the typist, but there were no results. Feebly he had punched a key two days ago and a $ sign had appeared. He hadn't dared touch the machine since. For Mr. Terry, that hard-hitting writer of two-gun action, had never been further west of Long Island than Elizabeth, and he had promised his wife, Ellen, that he would take the three children and herself on a trailer tour of the West that very summer. Since that promise, he could not write a word. Visions of whooping red-skinned Apaches and be-chapped outlaws raiding his little trailer home kept rolling up out of his subconscious. Yet he had to write at least three novelets and a fistful of short stories in the next two weeks to finance the great adventure—or the trip was off. So Lewis left the weathered old cottage in the early dawn and headed for his tubby old boat at the landing in an attempt to work out a salable yarn.... "Hey!" he shouted as a naked man sprang out of the bushes beside the road. "What's the trouble?" Then he had no time for further speech, the massive arms of the stranger had wound around him and two hamlike hands shut off his speech and his wind. He fought futilely against trained muscles. The hand clamping his throat relaxed for a moment and hacked along the side of his head. Blackness flooded the brain of Lewis, and he knew no more. "There it is," announced Thig, dropping the limp body of the captured Earthman to the metal deck-plates. "It is a male of the species that must have built the cities we saw as we landed." "He resembles Thig," announced Kam. "But for the strange covering he wears he might be Thig." "Thig will be this creature!" announced Torp. "With a psychic relay we will transfer the Earthman's memories and meager store of knowledge to the brain of Thig! He can then go out and scout this world without arousing suspicion. While he is gone, I will take Kam and explore the two inner planets." "You are the commander," said Thig. "But I wish this beast did not wear these clumsy sheathing upon his body. On Ortha we do not hamper the use of our limbs so." "Do not question the word of your commander," growled Torp, swelling out his thick chest menacingly. "It is for the good of our people that you disguise yourself as an Earthman." "For the good of the Horde," Thig intoned almost piously as he lifted Terry's body and headed for the laboratory. Service for the Horde was all that the men of Ortha knew. Carefully cultured and brought to life in the laboratories of their Horde, they knew neither father nor mother. Affection and love were entirely lacking in their early training and later life. They were trained antlike from childhood that only the growth and power of the Horde were of any moment. Men and women alike toiled and died like unfeeling robots of flesh and bone for the Horde. The Horde was their religion, their love-life, their everything! So it was that the bodies of the Earthman and the Orthan were strapped on two parallel tables of chill metal and the twin helmets, linked to one another by the intricacies of the psychic relay, put upon their heads. For ten hours or more the droning hum of the relay sucked Terry's brain dry of knowledge. The shock upon the nervous system of the Earthman proved too violent and his heart faltered after a time and stopped completely. Twice, with subtle drugs they restored pseudo-life to his body and kept the electrical impulses throbbing from his tortured brain, but after the third suspension of life Thig removed his helmet. "There is nothing more to learn," he informed his impassive comrades. "Now, let us get on with the plastic surgery that is required. My new body must return to its barbaric household before undue attention is aroused. And when I return I will take along some of the gleaming baubles we found on the red planet—these people value them highly." An hour later, his scars and altered cartilage already healed and painless, Thig again scraped sand over the entrance to the space ship and set out along the moonlit beach toward the nearest path running inland to his home. Memory was laying the country bare about him, Terry's own childhood memories of this particular section of Long Island. Here was the place where Jake and Ted had helped him dig for the buried treasure that old 'Notch-ear' Beggs had told them so exactly about. Remembrance of that episode gave Thig an idea about the little lump of jewels in his pocket. He had found them in a chest along the beach! He was coming up on the porch now and at the sound of his foot on the sagging boards the screen door burst open and three little Earth-creatures were hugging at his legs. An odd sensation, that his acquired memories labeled as pleasure, sent a warm glow upward from around his heart. Then he saw the slender red-haired shape of a woman, the mate of the dead man he knew, and confusion struck his well-trained brain. Men had no mates on Ortha, sex had been overthrown with all the other primitive impulses of barbarism; so he was incapable of understanding the emotions that swept through his acquired memory. Unsteadily he took her in his arms and felt her warm lips pressed, trembling, against his own. That same hot wave of pulsing blood choked achingly up into his throat. "Lew, dear," Ellen was asking, "where have you been all day? I called up at the landing but you were not there. I wanted to let you know that Saddlebag Publications sent a check for $50 for "Reversed Revolvers" and three other editors asked for shorts soon." "Shoulda got a hundred bucks for that yarn," grunted Thig, and gasped. For the moment he had been Lewis Terry and not Thig! So thoroughly had he acquired the knowledge of Terry that he found himself unconsciously adopting the thinking and mannerism of the other. All the better this way, he realized—more natural. "Sorry I was late," he said, digging into his pocket for the glittering baubles, "but I was poking around on the beach where we used to hunt treasure and I found an old chest. Inside it I found nothing but a handful of these." He flashed the jewels in front of Ellen's startled eyes and she clung, unbelieving, to his arm. "Why, Lew," she gasped, "they're worth a fortune! We can buy that new trailer now and have a rebuilt motor in the car. We can go west right away.... Hollywood, the Grand Canyon, cowboys!" "Uh huh," agreed the pseudo Lewis, memories of the ferocious savages and gunmen of his stories rendering him acutely unhappy. Sincerely he hoped that the west had reformed. "I saved some kraut and weiners," Ellen said. "Get washed up while I'm warming them up. Kids ate all the bread so I had to borrow some from the Eskoes. Want coffee, too?" "Mmmmmm," came from the depths of the chipped white wash-basin. "Home again," whispered Ellen as she stood beside Thig twelve weeks later and gazed tearfully at the weathered little gray house. She knelt beside the front stoop and reached for the key hidden beneath it. "The west was wonderful; tremendous, vast and beautiful," she went on as they climbed the steps, "but nowhere was there any place as beautiful as our own little strip of sky and water." Thig sank into a dusty old swing that hung on creaking chains from the exposed rafters of the porch roof. He looked down at the dusty gray car and the bulbous silvery bulk of the trailer that had been their living quarters for almost three months. Strange thoughts were afloat in the chaos of his cool Orthan brain. Tonight or tomorrow night at the latest he must contact his two fellows and report that Earth was a planetary paradise. No other world, including Ortha, was so well-favored and rich. An expeditionary force to wipe the grotesque civilizations of Earth out of existence would, of course, be necessary before the first units of new Hordes could be landed. And there Thig balked. Why must they destroy these people, imperfect though their civilization might be, to make room for the Hordes? Thig tried to tell himself that it was the transmitted thoughts of the dead Earthman that made him feel so, but he was not too sure. For three months he had lived with people who loved, hated, wept and sacrificed for reasons that he had never known existed. He had learned the heady glory of thinking for himself and making his own decisions. He had experienced the primitive joy of matching his wits and tongue against the wits of other unpredictable human beings. There was no abrupt division of men and women into definite classes of endeavor. A laborer thought the same thoughts that a governor might think. Uncertainty added zest to every day's life. The Orthan had come to question the sole devotion of the individual to the Horde to the exclusion of all other interests. What, he wondered, would one new world—or a hundred—populated by the Hordes add to the progress of humanity? For a hundred thousand years the Orthan civilization had remained static, its energies directed into certain well-defined channels. They were mindless bees maintaining their vast mechanical hives. There was that moment on the brink of the Grand Canyon when Ellen had caught his arm breathlessly at all the beauty spread away there beneath them. There were mornings in the desert when the sun painted in lurid red the peaks above the harsh black-and-whites of the sagebrush and cactus slopes. There was the little boy, his body burning with fever, who nestled trustingly against his tense man's body and slept—the son of Ellen and the man he had destroyed. Thig groaned. He was a weakling to let sentimentality so get the better of his judgment. He would go now to the space ship and urge them to blast off for Ortha. He sprang off the porch and strode away down the road toward the beach. The children ran to him; wanted to go along. He sent them away harshly but they smiled and waved their brown little hands. Ellen came to the door and called after him. "Hurry home, dear," she said. "I'll have a bite ready in about an hour." He dared not say anything, for his voice would have broken and she would have known something was wrong. She was a very wise sort of person when something was troubling him. He waved his stubby paw of a hand to show that he had heard, and blindly hurried toward the Sound. Oddly enough, as he hurried away along the narrow path through the autumn woods, his mind busied itself with a new epic of the west that lived no longer. He mentally titled it: "Rustlers' Riot" and blocked in the outlines of his plot. One section of his brain was that of the careless author of gunslinging yarns, a section that seemed to be sapping the life from his own brain. He knew that the story would never be written, but he toyed with the idea. So far had Thig the emotionless, robot-being from Ortha drifted from the unquestioning worship of the Horde! "You have done well," announced Torp when Thig had completed his report on the resources and temperatures of various sections of Terra. "We now have located three worlds fit for colonization and so we will return to Ortha at once. "I will recommend the conquest of this planet, 72-P-3 at once and the complete destruction of all biped life upon it. The mental aberrations of the barbaric natives might lead to endless complications if they were permitted to exist outside our ordered way of life. I imagine that three circuits of the planet about its primary should prove sufficient for the purposes of complete liquidation." "But why," asked Thig slowly, "could we not disarm all the natives and exile them on one of the less desirable continents, Antarctica for example or Siberia? They are primitive humans even as our race was once a race of primitives. It is not our duty to help to attain our own degree of knowledge and comfort?" "Only the good of the Horde matters!" shouted Torp angrily. "Shall a race of feeble-witted beasts, such as these Earthmen, stand in the way of a superior race? We want their world, and so we will take it. The Law of the Horde states that all the universe is ours for the taking." "Let us get back to Ortha at once, then," gritted out Thig savagely. "Never again do I wish to set foot upon the soil of this mad planet. There are forces at work upon Earth that we of Ortha have long forgotten." "Check the blood of Thig for disease, Kam," ordered Torp shortly. "His words are highly irrational. Some form of fever perhaps native to this world. While you examine him I will blast off for Ortha." Thig followed Kam into the tiny laboratory and found a seat beside the squat scientist's desk. His eyes roamed over the familiar instruments and gauges, each in its own precise position in the cases along the walls. His gaze lingered longest on the stubby black ugliness of a decomposition blaster in its rack close to the deck. A blast of the invisible radiations from that weapon's hot throat and flesh or vegetable fiber rotted into flaky ashes. The ship trembled beneath their feet; it tore free from the feeble clutch of the sand about it, and they were rocketing skyward. Thig's broad fingers bit deep into the unyielding metal of his chair. Suddenly he knew that he must go back to Earth, back to Ellen and the children of the man he had helped destroy. He loved Ellen, and nothing must stand between them! The Hordes of Ortha must find some other world, an empty world—this planet was not for them. "Turn back!" he cried wildly. "I must go back to Earth. There is a woman there, helpless and alone, who needs me! The Horde does not need this planet." Kam eyed him coldly and lifted a shining hypodermic syringe from its case. He approached Thig warily, aware that disease often made a maniac of the finest members of the Horde. "No human being is more important than the Horde," he stated baldly. "This woman of whom you speak is merely one unit of the millions we must eliminate for the good of the Horde." Then it was that Thig went berserk. His fists slashed into the thick jaw of the scientist and his fingers ripped at the hard cords overlying the Orthan's vital throat tubes. His fingers and thumb gouged deep into Kam's startled throat and choked off any cry for assistance before it could be uttered. Kam's hand swept down to the holster swung from his intricate harness and dragged his blaster from it. Thig's other hand clamped over his and for long moments they swayed there, locked together in silent deadly struggle. The fate of a world hung in the balance as Kam's other hand fought against that lone arm of Thig. The scales swung in favor of Kam. Slowly the flaring snout of his weapon tilted upward until it reached the level of Thig's waist. Thig suddenly released his grip and dragged his enemy toward him. A sudden reversal of pressure on Kam's gun hand sent the weapon swivelling about full upon its owner's thick torso. Thig's fingers pressed down upon Kam's button finger, down upon the stud set into the grip of the decomposition blaster, and Kam's muscles turned to water. He shrieked. Before Thig's eyes half of his comrade's body sloughed away into foul corruption that swiftly gave way to hardened blobs of dessicated matter. Horror for what he had done—that he had slain one of his own Horde—made his limbs move woodenly. All of his thoughts were dulled for the moment. Painfully slow, he turned his body around toward the control blister, turned around on leaden feet, to look full into the narrowed icy eyes of his commander. He saw the heavy barrel of the blaster slashing down against his skull but he could not swing a fraction of an inch out of the way. His body seemed paralyzed. This was the end, he thought as he waited stupidly for the blow to fall, the end for Ellen and the kids and all the struggling races of Earth. He would never write another cowboy yarn—they would all be dead anyhow soon. Then a thunderclap exploded against his head and he dropped endlessly toward the deck. Blows rained against his skull. He wondered if Torp would ever cease to hammer at him and turn the deadly ray of the weapon upon him. Blood throbbed and pounded with every blow.... Bam, Bam, Bam, the blood pounded in his ears. Like repeated blows of a hammer they shook his booming head. No longer was Torp above him. He was in the corner of the laboratory, a crumpled blood-smeared heap of bruised flesh and bone. He was unfettered and the blood was caked upon his skull and in his matted hair. Torp must have thought he had killed him with those savage blows upon the head. Even Torp, thought Thig ruefully, gave way to the primitive rage of his ancestors at times; but to that very bit of unconscious atavism he now owed his life. A cool-headed robot of an Orthan would have efficiently used the blaster to destroy any possibility of remaining life in his unconscious body. Thig rolled slowly over so that his eye found the door into the control room. Torp would be coming back again to dispose of their bodies through the refuse lock. Already the body of Kam was gone. He wondered why he had been left until last. Perhaps Torp wished to take cultures of his blood and tissues to determine whether a disease was responsible for his sudden madness. The cases of fragile instruments were just above his head. Association of memories brought him the flash of the heavy blaster in its rack beneath them. His hand went up and felt the welcome hardness of the weapon. He tugged it free. In a moment he was on his knees crawling across the plates of the deck toward the door. Halfway across the floor he collapsed on his face, the metal of the gun making a harsh clang. He heard the feet of Torp scuffle out of silence and a choked cry in the man's throat squalled out into a senseless whinny. Thig raised himself up on a quivering elbow and slid the black length of the blaster in front of him. His eyes sought the doorway and stared full into the glaring vacant orbs of his commander. Torp leaned there watching him, his breath gurgling brokenly through his deep-bitten lips. The clawing marks of nails, fingernails, furrowed his face and chest. He was a madman! The deadly attack of Thig; his own violent avenging of Kam's death, and now the apparent return of the man he had killed come to life had all served to jolt his rigidly trained brain from its accustomed groove. The shock had been too much for the established thought-processes of the Orthan. So Thig shot him where he stood, mercifully, before that vacant mad stare set him, too, to gibbering and shrieking. Then he stepped over the skeleton-thing that had been Torp, using the new strength that victory had given him to drive him along. He had saved a world's civilization from extinction! The thought sobered him; yet, somehow, he was pleased that he had done so. After all, it had been the Earthwoman and the children he had been thinking of while he battled Kam, a selfish desire to protect them all. He went to the desk where Torp had been writing in the ship's log and read the last few nervously scrawled lines: Planet 72-P-3 unfit for colonization. Some pernicious disease that strikes at the brain centers and causes violent insanity is existent there. Thig, just returned from a survey of the planet, went mad and destroyed Kam. In turn I was forced to slay him. But it is not ended. Already I feel the insidious virus of.... And there his writing ended abruptly. Thig nodded. That would do it. He set the automatic pilot for the planet Ortha. Unless a rogue asteroid or a comet crossed the ship's path she would return safely to Ortha with that mute warning of danger on 72-P-3. The body of Torp would help to confirm his final message. Then Thig crossed the cabin to the auxiliary life boat there, one of a half-dozen space ships in miniature nested within the great ship's hull, and cut free from the mother vessel. He flipped the drive lever, felt the thrumming of the rockets driving him from the parent ship. The sensation of free flight against his new body was strangely exhilerating and heady. It was the newest of the emotions he had experienced on Earth since that day, so many months before, when he had felt the warmness of Ellen's lips tight against his. Thig flipped the drive lever, felt the thrumming of the rockets driving him from the parent ship. He swung about to the port, watched the flaming drive-rockets of the great exploratory ship hurl it toward far-away Ortha, and there was no regret in his mind that he was not returning to the planet of his first existence. He thought of the dull greys and blacks of his planet, of the monotonous routine of existence that had once been his—and his heart thrilled to the memories of the starry nights and perfect exciting days he had spent on his three month trip over Earth. He made a brief salute to the existence he had known, turned with a tiny sigh, and his fingers made brief adjustments in the controls. The rocket-thrum deepened, and the thin whistle of tenuous air clutching the ship echoed through the hull-plates. He thought of many things in those few moments. He watched the roundness of Earth flatten out, then take on the cup-like illusion that all planets had for an incoming ship. He reduced the drive of his rockets to a mere whisper, striving to control the impatience that crowded his mind. He shivered suddenly, remembering his utter callousness the first time he had sent a space ship whipping down toward the hills and valleys below. And there was a sickness within him when he fully realized that, despite his acquired memory and traits, he was an alien from outer space. He fingered the tiny scars that had completely obliterated the slight differences in his appearance from an Earthman's, and his fingers trembled a bit, as he bent and stared through the vision port. He said a brief prayer in his heart to a God whose presence he now felt very deeply. There were tears in the depths of his eyes, then, and memories were hot, bitter pains. Earth was not far below him. As he let gravity suck him earthward, he heaved a gasp of relief. He was no longer Thig, a creature of a Horde's creation, but Lewis Terry, writer of lurid gun-smoking tales of the West. He must remember that always. He had destroyed the real Terry and now, for the rest of his life, he must make up to the dead man's family. The knowledge that Ellen's love was not really meant for him would be a knife twisting in his heart but for her sake he must endure it. Her dreams and happiness must never be shattered. The bulge of Earth was flattening out now and he could see the outlines of Long Island in the growing twilight. A new plot was growing in the brain of Lewis Terry, a yarn about a cowboy suddenly transported to another world. He smiled ironically. He had seen those other worlds. Perhaps some day he would write about them.... He was Lewis Terry! He must remember that!

Describe the setting of the story.

2

There are three settings in the story, two of which are present in the story and the third is remembered. The first setting is the space cruiser that brings the Orthans to Earth. The space cruiser lands on a beach across the Sound from Connecticut. It is buried in the sand to prevent it from being seen by the Earthmen. It contains a laboratory with instruments and gauges that enable the Orthans to capture the memories and knowledge of another species. It is also outfitted with their decomposition blasters that reduce living organisms to flaky ashes. There is also a control room where Torp guides the space cruiser on its travels through the galaxy and keeps the ship’s log detailing its journeys and findings. Wastes are disposed of with a refuse lock. The ship carries auxiliary lifeboats, which are basically miniatures of the larger ship, for emergencies. The setting on Earth is based in Connecticut where the space cruiser lands on a beach. There is sand at the beach, trees and shrubs, highways, and other manmade features. It also features Lewis Terry’s cottage where he lives with his family. It is a weathered small gray house with sagging boards, a front porch, and a porch swing. When the family visits the West, they stop at the Grand Canyon, and Thig is breathless when he sees its beauty. He also notes the sun-painted red peaks in the desert and beautiful starry nights. Thig remembers Ortha as dull, gray, and black and associates it with a monotonous routine.

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QUEST OF THIG By BASIL WELLS Thig of Ortha was the vanguard of the conquering "HORDE." He had blasted across trackless space to subdue a defenseless world—only to meet on Earth emotions that were more deadly than weapons. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Thig carefully smoothed the dark sand and seaweed of the lonely beach over the metal lid of the flexible ringed tunnel that linked the grubby ship from another planet with the upper air. He looked out across the heaving waters of the Sound toward Connecticut. He stared appraisingly around at the luxuriant green growth of foliage further inland; and started toward the little stretch of trees and brush, walking carefully because of the lesser gravitation. Thig was shorter than the average Earthman—although on Ortha he was well above the average in height—but his body was thick and powerfully muscled. His skull was well-shaped and large; his features were regular, perhaps a trifle oversize, and his hair and eyes were a curiously matching blend of reddish brown. Oddest of all, he wore no garments, other than the necessary belt and straps to support his rod-like weapon of white metal and his pouches for food and specimens. The Orthan entered the narrow strip of trees and crossed to the little-used highway on the other side. Here he patiently sat down to wait for an Earthman or an Earthwoman to pass. His task now was to bring a native, intact if possible, back to the carefully buried space cruiser where his two fellows and himself would drain the creature's mentality of all its knowledge. In this way they could learn whether a planet was suited for colonization by later swarms of Orthans. Already they had charted over a hundred celestial bodies but of them all only three had proven worthy of consideration. This latest planet, however, 72-P-3 on the chart, appeared to be an ideal world in every respect. Sunlight, plenty of water and a dense atmospheric envelope made of 72-P-3 a paradise among planets. The explorer from another world crouched into the concealment of a leafy shrub. A creature was approaching. Its squat body was covered with baggy strips of bluish cloth and it carried a jointed rod of metal and wood in its paw. It walked upright as did the men of Ortha. Thig's cold eyes opened a trifle wider as he stared into the thing's stupid face. It was as though he was looking into a bit of polished metal at the reflection of himself! The Earthman was opposite now and he must waste no more precious time. The mighty muscles of the Orthan sent him hurtling across the intervening space in two prodigious bounds, and his hands clamped across the mouth and neck of the stranger.... Lewis Terry was going fishing. For a week the typewriter mill that had ground out a thousand assorted yarns of the untamed West and the frigid desolation of the Northwoods had been silent. Lewis wondered if he was going stale. He had sat every day for eight hours in front of that shiny-buttoned bane of the typist, but there were no results. Feebly he had punched a key two days ago and a $ sign had appeared. He hadn't dared touch the machine since. For Mr. Terry, that hard-hitting writer of two-gun action, had never been further west of Long Island than Elizabeth, and he had promised his wife, Ellen, that he would take the three children and herself on a trailer tour of the West that very summer. Since that promise, he could not write a word. Visions of whooping red-skinned Apaches and be-chapped outlaws raiding his little trailer home kept rolling up out of his subconscious. Yet he had to write at least three novelets and a fistful of short stories in the next two weeks to finance the great adventure—or the trip was off. So Lewis left the weathered old cottage in the early dawn and headed for his tubby old boat at the landing in an attempt to work out a salable yarn.... "Hey!" he shouted as a naked man sprang out of the bushes beside the road. "What's the trouble?" Then he had no time for further speech, the massive arms of the stranger had wound around him and two hamlike hands shut off his speech and his wind. He fought futilely against trained muscles. The hand clamping his throat relaxed for a moment and hacked along the side of his head. Blackness flooded the brain of Lewis, and he knew no more. "There it is," announced Thig, dropping the limp body of the captured Earthman to the metal deck-plates. "It is a male of the species that must have built the cities we saw as we landed." "He resembles Thig," announced Kam. "But for the strange covering he wears he might be Thig." "Thig will be this creature!" announced Torp. "With a psychic relay we will transfer the Earthman's memories and meager store of knowledge to the brain of Thig! He can then go out and scout this world without arousing suspicion. While he is gone, I will take Kam and explore the two inner planets." "You are the commander," said Thig. "But I wish this beast did not wear these clumsy sheathing upon his body. On Ortha we do not hamper the use of our limbs so." "Do not question the word of your commander," growled Torp, swelling out his thick chest menacingly. "It is for the good of our people that you disguise yourself as an Earthman." "For the good of the Horde," Thig intoned almost piously as he lifted Terry's body and headed for the laboratory. Service for the Horde was all that the men of Ortha knew. Carefully cultured and brought to life in the laboratories of their Horde, they knew neither father nor mother. Affection and love were entirely lacking in their early training and later life. They were trained antlike from childhood that only the growth and power of the Horde were of any moment. Men and women alike toiled and died like unfeeling robots of flesh and bone for the Horde. The Horde was their religion, their love-life, their everything! So it was that the bodies of the Earthman and the Orthan were strapped on two parallel tables of chill metal and the twin helmets, linked to one another by the intricacies of the psychic relay, put upon their heads. For ten hours or more the droning hum of the relay sucked Terry's brain dry of knowledge. The shock upon the nervous system of the Earthman proved too violent and his heart faltered after a time and stopped completely. Twice, with subtle drugs they restored pseudo-life to his body and kept the electrical impulses throbbing from his tortured brain, but after the third suspension of life Thig removed his helmet. "There is nothing more to learn," he informed his impassive comrades. "Now, let us get on with the plastic surgery that is required. My new body must return to its barbaric household before undue attention is aroused. And when I return I will take along some of the gleaming baubles we found on the red planet—these people value them highly." An hour later, his scars and altered cartilage already healed and painless, Thig again scraped sand over the entrance to the space ship and set out along the moonlit beach toward the nearest path running inland to his home. Memory was laying the country bare about him, Terry's own childhood memories of this particular section of Long Island. Here was the place where Jake and Ted had helped him dig for the buried treasure that old 'Notch-ear' Beggs had told them so exactly about. Remembrance of that episode gave Thig an idea about the little lump of jewels in his pocket. He had found them in a chest along the beach! He was coming up on the porch now and at the sound of his foot on the sagging boards the screen door burst open and three little Earth-creatures were hugging at his legs. An odd sensation, that his acquired memories labeled as pleasure, sent a warm glow upward from around his heart. Then he saw the slender red-haired shape of a woman, the mate of the dead man he knew, and confusion struck his well-trained brain. Men had no mates on Ortha, sex had been overthrown with all the other primitive impulses of barbarism; so he was incapable of understanding the emotions that swept through his acquired memory. Unsteadily he took her in his arms and felt her warm lips pressed, trembling, against his own. That same hot wave of pulsing blood choked achingly up into his throat. "Lew, dear," Ellen was asking, "where have you been all day? I called up at the landing but you were not there. I wanted to let you know that Saddlebag Publications sent a check for $50 for "Reversed Revolvers" and three other editors asked for shorts soon." "Shoulda got a hundred bucks for that yarn," grunted Thig, and gasped. For the moment he had been Lewis Terry and not Thig! So thoroughly had he acquired the knowledge of Terry that he found himself unconsciously adopting the thinking and mannerism of the other. All the better this way, he realized—more natural. "Sorry I was late," he said, digging into his pocket for the glittering baubles, "but I was poking around on the beach where we used to hunt treasure and I found an old chest. Inside it I found nothing but a handful of these." He flashed the jewels in front of Ellen's startled eyes and she clung, unbelieving, to his arm. "Why, Lew," she gasped, "they're worth a fortune! We can buy that new trailer now and have a rebuilt motor in the car. We can go west right away.... Hollywood, the Grand Canyon, cowboys!" "Uh huh," agreed the pseudo Lewis, memories of the ferocious savages and gunmen of his stories rendering him acutely unhappy. Sincerely he hoped that the west had reformed. "I saved some kraut and weiners," Ellen said. "Get washed up while I'm warming them up. Kids ate all the bread so I had to borrow some from the Eskoes. Want coffee, too?" "Mmmmmm," came from the depths of the chipped white wash-basin. "Home again," whispered Ellen as she stood beside Thig twelve weeks later and gazed tearfully at the weathered little gray house. She knelt beside the front stoop and reached for the key hidden beneath it. "The west was wonderful; tremendous, vast and beautiful," she went on as they climbed the steps, "but nowhere was there any place as beautiful as our own little strip of sky and water." Thig sank into a dusty old swing that hung on creaking chains from the exposed rafters of the porch roof. He looked down at the dusty gray car and the bulbous silvery bulk of the trailer that had been their living quarters for almost three months. Strange thoughts were afloat in the chaos of his cool Orthan brain. Tonight or tomorrow night at the latest he must contact his two fellows and report that Earth was a planetary paradise. No other world, including Ortha, was so well-favored and rich. An expeditionary force to wipe the grotesque civilizations of Earth out of existence would, of course, be necessary before the first units of new Hordes could be landed. And there Thig balked. Why must they destroy these people, imperfect though their civilization might be, to make room for the Hordes? Thig tried to tell himself that it was the transmitted thoughts of the dead Earthman that made him feel so, but he was not too sure. For three months he had lived with people who loved, hated, wept and sacrificed for reasons that he had never known existed. He had learned the heady glory of thinking for himself and making his own decisions. He had experienced the primitive joy of matching his wits and tongue against the wits of other unpredictable human beings. There was no abrupt division of men and women into definite classes of endeavor. A laborer thought the same thoughts that a governor might think. Uncertainty added zest to every day's life. The Orthan had come to question the sole devotion of the individual to the Horde to the exclusion of all other interests. What, he wondered, would one new world—or a hundred—populated by the Hordes add to the progress of humanity? For a hundred thousand years the Orthan civilization had remained static, its energies directed into certain well-defined channels. They were mindless bees maintaining their vast mechanical hives. There was that moment on the brink of the Grand Canyon when Ellen had caught his arm breathlessly at all the beauty spread away there beneath them. There were mornings in the desert when the sun painted in lurid red the peaks above the harsh black-and-whites of the sagebrush and cactus slopes. There was the little boy, his body burning with fever, who nestled trustingly against his tense man's body and slept—the son of Ellen and the man he had destroyed. Thig groaned. He was a weakling to let sentimentality so get the better of his judgment. He would go now to the space ship and urge them to blast off for Ortha. He sprang off the porch and strode away down the road toward the beach. The children ran to him; wanted to go along. He sent them away harshly but they smiled and waved their brown little hands. Ellen came to the door and called after him. "Hurry home, dear," she said. "I'll have a bite ready in about an hour." He dared not say anything, for his voice would have broken and she would have known something was wrong. She was a very wise sort of person when something was troubling him. He waved his stubby paw of a hand to show that he had heard, and blindly hurried toward the Sound. Oddly enough, as he hurried away along the narrow path through the autumn woods, his mind busied itself with a new epic of the west that lived no longer. He mentally titled it: "Rustlers' Riot" and blocked in the outlines of his plot. One section of his brain was that of the careless author of gunslinging yarns, a section that seemed to be sapping the life from his own brain. He knew that the story would never be written, but he toyed with the idea. So far had Thig the emotionless, robot-being from Ortha drifted from the unquestioning worship of the Horde! "You have done well," announced Torp when Thig had completed his report on the resources and temperatures of various sections of Terra. "We now have located three worlds fit for colonization and so we will return to Ortha at once. "I will recommend the conquest of this planet, 72-P-3 at once and the complete destruction of all biped life upon it. The mental aberrations of the barbaric natives might lead to endless complications if they were permitted to exist outside our ordered way of life. I imagine that three circuits of the planet about its primary should prove sufficient for the purposes of complete liquidation." "But why," asked Thig slowly, "could we not disarm all the natives and exile them on one of the less desirable continents, Antarctica for example or Siberia? They are primitive humans even as our race was once a race of primitives. It is not our duty to help to attain our own degree of knowledge and comfort?" "Only the good of the Horde matters!" shouted Torp angrily. "Shall a race of feeble-witted beasts, such as these Earthmen, stand in the way of a superior race? We want their world, and so we will take it. The Law of the Horde states that all the universe is ours for the taking." "Let us get back to Ortha at once, then," gritted out Thig savagely. "Never again do I wish to set foot upon the soil of this mad planet. There are forces at work upon Earth that we of Ortha have long forgotten." "Check the blood of Thig for disease, Kam," ordered Torp shortly. "His words are highly irrational. Some form of fever perhaps native to this world. While you examine him I will blast off for Ortha." Thig followed Kam into the tiny laboratory and found a seat beside the squat scientist's desk. His eyes roamed over the familiar instruments and gauges, each in its own precise position in the cases along the walls. His gaze lingered longest on the stubby black ugliness of a decomposition blaster in its rack close to the deck. A blast of the invisible radiations from that weapon's hot throat and flesh or vegetable fiber rotted into flaky ashes. The ship trembled beneath their feet; it tore free from the feeble clutch of the sand about it, and they were rocketing skyward. Thig's broad fingers bit deep into the unyielding metal of his chair. Suddenly he knew that he must go back to Earth, back to Ellen and the children of the man he had helped destroy. He loved Ellen, and nothing must stand between them! The Hordes of Ortha must find some other world, an empty world—this planet was not for them. "Turn back!" he cried wildly. "I must go back to Earth. There is a woman there, helpless and alone, who needs me! The Horde does not need this planet." Kam eyed him coldly and lifted a shining hypodermic syringe from its case. He approached Thig warily, aware that disease often made a maniac of the finest members of the Horde. "No human being is more important than the Horde," he stated baldly. "This woman of whom you speak is merely one unit of the millions we must eliminate for the good of the Horde." Then it was that Thig went berserk. His fists slashed into the thick jaw of the scientist and his fingers ripped at the hard cords overlying the Orthan's vital throat tubes. His fingers and thumb gouged deep into Kam's startled throat and choked off any cry for assistance before it could be uttered. Kam's hand swept down to the holster swung from his intricate harness and dragged his blaster from it. Thig's other hand clamped over his and for long moments they swayed there, locked together in silent deadly struggle. The fate of a world hung in the balance as Kam's other hand fought against that lone arm of Thig. The scales swung in favor of Kam. Slowly the flaring snout of his weapon tilted upward until it reached the level of Thig's waist. Thig suddenly released his grip and dragged his enemy toward him. A sudden reversal of pressure on Kam's gun hand sent the weapon swivelling about full upon its owner's thick torso. Thig's fingers pressed down upon Kam's button finger, down upon the stud set into the grip of the decomposition blaster, and Kam's muscles turned to water. He shrieked. Before Thig's eyes half of his comrade's body sloughed away into foul corruption that swiftly gave way to hardened blobs of dessicated matter. Horror for what he had done—that he had slain one of his own Horde—made his limbs move woodenly. All of his thoughts were dulled for the moment. Painfully slow, he turned his body around toward the control blister, turned around on leaden feet, to look full into the narrowed icy eyes of his commander. He saw the heavy barrel of the blaster slashing down against his skull but he could not swing a fraction of an inch out of the way. His body seemed paralyzed. This was the end, he thought as he waited stupidly for the blow to fall, the end for Ellen and the kids and all the struggling races of Earth. He would never write another cowboy yarn—they would all be dead anyhow soon. Then a thunderclap exploded against his head and he dropped endlessly toward the deck. Blows rained against his skull. He wondered if Torp would ever cease to hammer at him and turn the deadly ray of the weapon upon him. Blood throbbed and pounded with every blow.... Bam, Bam, Bam, the blood pounded in his ears. Like repeated blows of a hammer they shook his booming head. No longer was Torp above him. He was in the corner of the laboratory, a crumpled blood-smeared heap of bruised flesh and bone. He was unfettered and the blood was caked upon his skull and in his matted hair. Torp must have thought he had killed him with those savage blows upon the head. Even Torp, thought Thig ruefully, gave way to the primitive rage of his ancestors at times; but to that very bit of unconscious atavism he now owed his life. A cool-headed robot of an Orthan would have efficiently used the blaster to destroy any possibility of remaining life in his unconscious body. Thig rolled slowly over so that his eye found the door into the control room. Torp would be coming back again to dispose of their bodies through the refuse lock. Already the body of Kam was gone. He wondered why he had been left until last. Perhaps Torp wished to take cultures of his blood and tissues to determine whether a disease was responsible for his sudden madness. The cases of fragile instruments were just above his head. Association of memories brought him the flash of the heavy blaster in its rack beneath them. His hand went up and felt the welcome hardness of the weapon. He tugged it free. In a moment he was on his knees crawling across the plates of the deck toward the door. Halfway across the floor he collapsed on his face, the metal of the gun making a harsh clang. He heard the feet of Torp scuffle out of silence and a choked cry in the man's throat squalled out into a senseless whinny. Thig raised himself up on a quivering elbow and slid the black length of the blaster in front of him. His eyes sought the doorway and stared full into the glaring vacant orbs of his commander. Torp leaned there watching him, his breath gurgling brokenly through his deep-bitten lips. The clawing marks of nails, fingernails, furrowed his face and chest. He was a madman! The deadly attack of Thig; his own violent avenging of Kam's death, and now the apparent return of the man he had killed come to life had all served to jolt his rigidly trained brain from its accustomed groove. The shock had been too much for the established thought-processes of the Orthan. So Thig shot him where he stood, mercifully, before that vacant mad stare set him, too, to gibbering and shrieking. Then he stepped over the skeleton-thing that had been Torp, using the new strength that victory had given him to drive him along. He had saved a world's civilization from extinction! The thought sobered him; yet, somehow, he was pleased that he had done so. After all, it had been the Earthwoman and the children he had been thinking of while he battled Kam, a selfish desire to protect them all. He went to the desk where Torp had been writing in the ship's log and read the last few nervously scrawled lines: Planet 72-P-3 unfit for colonization. Some pernicious disease that strikes at the brain centers and causes violent insanity is existent there. Thig, just returned from a survey of the planet, went mad and destroyed Kam. In turn I was forced to slay him. But it is not ended. Already I feel the insidious virus of.... And there his writing ended abruptly. Thig nodded. That would do it. He set the automatic pilot for the planet Ortha. Unless a rogue asteroid or a comet crossed the ship's path she would return safely to Ortha with that mute warning of danger on 72-P-3. The body of Torp would help to confirm his final message. Then Thig crossed the cabin to the auxiliary life boat there, one of a half-dozen space ships in miniature nested within the great ship's hull, and cut free from the mother vessel. He flipped the drive lever, felt the thrumming of the rockets driving him from the parent ship. The sensation of free flight against his new body was strangely exhilerating and heady. It was the newest of the emotions he had experienced on Earth since that day, so many months before, when he had felt the warmness of Ellen's lips tight against his. Thig flipped the drive lever, felt the thrumming of the rockets driving him from the parent ship. He swung about to the port, watched the flaming drive-rockets of the great exploratory ship hurl it toward far-away Ortha, and there was no regret in his mind that he was not returning to the planet of his first existence. He thought of the dull greys and blacks of his planet, of the monotonous routine of existence that had once been his—and his heart thrilled to the memories of the starry nights and perfect exciting days he had spent on his three month trip over Earth. He made a brief salute to the existence he had known, turned with a tiny sigh, and his fingers made brief adjustments in the controls. The rocket-thrum deepened, and the thin whistle of tenuous air clutching the ship echoed through the hull-plates. He thought of many things in those few moments. He watched the roundness of Earth flatten out, then take on the cup-like illusion that all planets had for an incoming ship. He reduced the drive of his rockets to a mere whisper, striving to control the impatience that crowded his mind. He shivered suddenly, remembering his utter callousness the first time he had sent a space ship whipping down toward the hills and valleys below. And there was a sickness within him when he fully realized that, despite his acquired memory and traits, he was an alien from outer space. He fingered the tiny scars that had completely obliterated the slight differences in his appearance from an Earthman's, and his fingers trembled a bit, as he bent and stared through the vision port. He said a brief prayer in his heart to a God whose presence he now felt very deeply. There were tears in the depths of his eyes, then, and memories were hot, bitter pains. Earth was not far below him. As he let gravity suck him earthward, he heaved a gasp of relief. He was no longer Thig, a creature of a Horde's creation, but Lewis Terry, writer of lurid gun-smoking tales of the West. He must remember that always. He had destroyed the real Terry and now, for the rest of his life, he must make up to the dead man's family. The knowledge that Ellen's love was not really meant for him would be a knife twisting in his heart but for her sake he must endure it. Her dreams and happiness must never be shattered. The bulge of Earth was flattening out now and he could see the outlines of Long Island in the growing twilight. A new plot was growing in the brain of Lewis Terry, a yarn about a cowboy suddenly transported to another world. He smiled ironically. He had seen those other worlds. Perhaps some day he would write about them.... He was Lewis Terry! He must remember that!

How do the ways of Ortha differ from those Thig discovers on Earth?

9

The society on Ortha has discarded what they consider to be primal or barbaric tendencies and customs. Their children are raised in laboratories never knowing their parents and are not shown love or affection. They are taught to value loyalty to the Orthan “Hordes” over everything, and to believe that they are entitled to anything in the universe that they desire, with no regard to those outside the Hordes. They don’t have mates or have sex, though they do walk around naked. Free thought and primal urges are discouraged, and Orthan society has attempted to filter out any behavior they consider to be barbaric in favor of a robotic, obedient populace. By contrast, Thig discovers that humans feel the full gamut of emotions, think for themselves, and feel empathy rather than the dispassionate callousness Ortha demands.

62198

QUEST OF THIG By BASIL WELLS Thig of Ortha was the vanguard of the conquering "HORDE." He had blasted across trackless space to subdue a defenseless world—only to meet on Earth emotions that were more deadly than weapons. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Thig carefully smoothed the dark sand and seaweed of the lonely beach over the metal lid of the flexible ringed tunnel that linked the grubby ship from another planet with the upper air. He looked out across the heaving waters of the Sound toward Connecticut. He stared appraisingly around at the luxuriant green growth of foliage further inland; and started toward the little stretch of trees and brush, walking carefully because of the lesser gravitation. Thig was shorter than the average Earthman—although on Ortha he was well above the average in height—but his body was thick and powerfully muscled. His skull was well-shaped and large; his features were regular, perhaps a trifle oversize, and his hair and eyes were a curiously matching blend of reddish brown. Oddest of all, he wore no garments, other than the necessary belt and straps to support his rod-like weapon of white metal and his pouches for food and specimens. The Orthan entered the narrow strip of trees and crossed to the little-used highway on the other side. Here he patiently sat down to wait for an Earthman or an Earthwoman to pass. His task now was to bring a native, intact if possible, back to the carefully buried space cruiser where his two fellows and himself would drain the creature's mentality of all its knowledge. In this way they could learn whether a planet was suited for colonization by later swarms of Orthans. Already they had charted over a hundred celestial bodies but of them all only three had proven worthy of consideration. This latest planet, however, 72-P-3 on the chart, appeared to be an ideal world in every respect. Sunlight, plenty of water and a dense atmospheric envelope made of 72-P-3 a paradise among planets. The explorer from another world crouched into the concealment of a leafy shrub. A creature was approaching. Its squat body was covered with baggy strips of bluish cloth and it carried a jointed rod of metal and wood in its paw. It walked upright as did the men of Ortha. Thig's cold eyes opened a trifle wider as he stared into the thing's stupid face. It was as though he was looking into a bit of polished metal at the reflection of himself! The Earthman was opposite now and he must waste no more precious time. The mighty muscles of the Orthan sent him hurtling across the intervening space in two prodigious bounds, and his hands clamped across the mouth and neck of the stranger.... Lewis Terry was going fishing. For a week the typewriter mill that had ground out a thousand assorted yarns of the untamed West and the frigid desolation of the Northwoods had been silent. Lewis wondered if he was going stale. He had sat every day for eight hours in front of that shiny-buttoned bane of the typist, but there were no results. Feebly he had punched a key two days ago and a $ sign had appeared. He hadn't dared touch the machine since. For Mr. Terry, that hard-hitting writer of two-gun action, had never been further west of Long Island than Elizabeth, and he had promised his wife, Ellen, that he would take the three children and herself on a trailer tour of the West that very summer. Since that promise, he could not write a word. Visions of whooping red-skinned Apaches and be-chapped outlaws raiding his little trailer home kept rolling up out of his subconscious. Yet he had to write at least three novelets and a fistful of short stories in the next two weeks to finance the great adventure—or the trip was off. So Lewis left the weathered old cottage in the early dawn and headed for his tubby old boat at the landing in an attempt to work out a salable yarn.... "Hey!" he shouted as a naked man sprang out of the bushes beside the road. "What's the trouble?" Then he had no time for further speech, the massive arms of the stranger had wound around him and two hamlike hands shut off his speech and his wind. He fought futilely against trained muscles. The hand clamping his throat relaxed for a moment and hacked along the side of his head. Blackness flooded the brain of Lewis, and he knew no more. "There it is," announced Thig, dropping the limp body of the captured Earthman to the metal deck-plates. "It is a male of the species that must have built the cities we saw as we landed." "He resembles Thig," announced Kam. "But for the strange covering he wears he might be Thig." "Thig will be this creature!" announced Torp. "With a psychic relay we will transfer the Earthman's memories and meager store of knowledge to the brain of Thig! He can then go out and scout this world without arousing suspicion. While he is gone, I will take Kam and explore the two inner planets." "You are the commander," said Thig. "But I wish this beast did not wear these clumsy sheathing upon his body. On Ortha we do not hamper the use of our limbs so." "Do not question the word of your commander," growled Torp, swelling out his thick chest menacingly. "It is for the good of our people that you disguise yourself as an Earthman." "For the good of the Horde," Thig intoned almost piously as he lifted Terry's body and headed for the laboratory. Service for the Horde was all that the men of Ortha knew. Carefully cultured and brought to life in the laboratories of their Horde, they knew neither father nor mother. Affection and love were entirely lacking in their early training and later life. They were trained antlike from childhood that only the growth and power of the Horde were of any moment. Men and women alike toiled and died like unfeeling robots of flesh and bone for the Horde. The Horde was their religion, their love-life, their everything! So it was that the bodies of the Earthman and the Orthan were strapped on two parallel tables of chill metal and the twin helmets, linked to one another by the intricacies of the psychic relay, put upon their heads. For ten hours or more the droning hum of the relay sucked Terry's brain dry of knowledge. The shock upon the nervous system of the Earthman proved too violent and his heart faltered after a time and stopped completely. Twice, with subtle drugs they restored pseudo-life to his body and kept the electrical impulses throbbing from his tortured brain, but after the third suspension of life Thig removed his helmet. "There is nothing more to learn," he informed his impassive comrades. "Now, let us get on with the plastic surgery that is required. My new body must return to its barbaric household before undue attention is aroused. And when I return I will take along some of the gleaming baubles we found on the red planet—these people value them highly." An hour later, his scars and altered cartilage already healed and painless, Thig again scraped sand over the entrance to the space ship and set out along the moonlit beach toward the nearest path running inland to his home. Memory was laying the country bare about him, Terry's own childhood memories of this particular section of Long Island. Here was the place where Jake and Ted had helped him dig for the buried treasure that old 'Notch-ear' Beggs had told them so exactly about. Remembrance of that episode gave Thig an idea about the little lump of jewels in his pocket. He had found them in a chest along the beach! He was coming up on the porch now and at the sound of his foot on the sagging boards the screen door burst open and three little Earth-creatures were hugging at his legs. An odd sensation, that his acquired memories labeled as pleasure, sent a warm glow upward from around his heart. Then he saw the slender red-haired shape of a woman, the mate of the dead man he knew, and confusion struck his well-trained brain. Men had no mates on Ortha, sex had been overthrown with all the other primitive impulses of barbarism; so he was incapable of understanding the emotions that swept through his acquired memory. Unsteadily he took her in his arms and felt her warm lips pressed, trembling, against his own. That same hot wave of pulsing blood choked achingly up into his throat. "Lew, dear," Ellen was asking, "where have you been all day? I called up at the landing but you were not there. I wanted to let you know that Saddlebag Publications sent a check for $50 for "Reversed Revolvers" and three other editors asked for shorts soon." "Shoulda got a hundred bucks for that yarn," grunted Thig, and gasped. For the moment he had been Lewis Terry and not Thig! So thoroughly had he acquired the knowledge of Terry that he found himself unconsciously adopting the thinking and mannerism of the other. All the better this way, he realized—more natural. "Sorry I was late," he said, digging into his pocket for the glittering baubles, "but I was poking around on the beach where we used to hunt treasure and I found an old chest. Inside it I found nothing but a handful of these." He flashed the jewels in front of Ellen's startled eyes and she clung, unbelieving, to his arm. "Why, Lew," she gasped, "they're worth a fortune! We can buy that new trailer now and have a rebuilt motor in the car. We can go west right away.... Hollywood, the Grand Canyon, cowboys!" "Uh huh," agreed the pseudo Lewis, memories of the ferocious savages and gunmen of his stories rendering him acutely unhappy. Sincerely he hoped that the west had reformed. "I saved some kraut and weiners," Ellen said. "Get washed up while I'm warming them up. Kids ate all the bread so I had to borrow some from the Eskoes. Want coffee, too?" "Mmmmmm," came from the depths of the chipped white wash-basin. "Home again," whispered Ellen as she stood beside Thig twelve weeks later and gazed tearfully at the weathered little gray house. She knelt beside the front stoop and reached for the key hidden beneath it. "The west was wonderful; tremendous, vast and beautiful," she went on as they climbed the steps, "but nowhere was there any place as beautiful as our own little strip of sky and water." Thig sank into a dusty old swing that hung on creaking chains from the exposed rafters of the porch roof. He looked down at the dusty gray car and the bulbous silvery bulk of the trailer that had been their living quarters for almost three months. Strange thoughts were afloat in the chaos of his cool Orthan brain. Tonight or tomorrow night at the latest he must contact his two fellows and report that Earth was a planetary paradise. No other world, including Ortha, was so well-favored and rich. An expeditionary force to wipe the grotesque civilizations of Earth out of existence would, of course, be necessary before the first units of new Hordes could be landed. And there Thig balked. Why must they destroy these people, imperfect though their civilization might be, to make room for the Hordes? Thig tried to tell himself that it was the transmitted thoughts of the dead Earthman that made him feel so, but he was not too sure. For three months he had lived with people who loved, hated, wept and sacrificed for reasons that he had never known existed. He had learned the heady glory of thinking for himself and making his own decisions. He had experienced the primitive joy of matching his wits and tongue against the wits of other unpredictable human beings. There was no abrupt division of men and women into definite classes of endeavor. A laborer thought the same thoughts that a governor might think. Uncertainty added zest to every day's life. The Orthan had come to question the sole devotion of the individual to the Horde to the exclusion of all other interests. What, he wondered, would one new world—or a hundred—populated by the Hordes add to the progress of humanity? For a hundred thousand years the Orthan civilization had remained static, its energies directed into certain well-defined channels. They were mindless bees maintaining their vast mechanical hives. There was that moment on the brink of the Grand Canyon when Ellen had caught his arm breathlessly at all the beauty spread away there beneath them. There were mornings in the desert when the sun painted in lurid red the peaks above the harsh black-and-whites of the sagebrush and cactus slopes. There was the little boy, his body burning with fever, who nestled trustingly against his tense man's body and slept—the son of Ellen and the man he had destroyed. Thig groaned. He was a weakling to let sentimentality so get the better of his judgment. He would go now to the space ship and urge them to blast off for Ortha. He sprang off the porch and strode away down the road toward the beach. The children ran to him; wanted to go along. He sent them away harshly but they smiled and waved their brown little hands. Ellen came to the door and called after him. "Hurry home, dear," she said. "I'll have a bite ready in about an hour." He dared not say anything, for his voice would have broken and she would have known something was wrong. She was a very wise sort of person when something was troubling him. He waved his stubby paw of a hand to show that he had heard, and blindly hurried toward the Sound. Oddly enough, as he hurried away along the narrow path through the autumn woods, his mind busied itself with a new epic of the west that lived no longer. He mentally titled it: "Rustlers' Riot" and blocked in the outlines of his plot. One section of his brain was that of the careless author of gunslinging yarns, a section that seemed to be sapping the life from his own brain. He knew that the story would never be written, but he toyed with the idea. So far had Thig the emotionless, robot-being from Ortha drifted from the unquestioning worship of the Horde! "You have done well," announced Torp when Thig had completed his report on the resources and temperatures of various sections of Terra. "We now have located three worlds fit for colonization and so we will return to Ortha at once. "I will recommend the conquest of this planet, 72-P-3 at once and the complete destruction of all biped life upon it. The mental aberrations of the barbaric natives might lead to endless complications if they were permitted to exist outside our ordered way of life. I imagine that three circuits of the planet about its primary should prove sufficient for the purposes of complete liquidation." "But why," asked Thig slowly, "could we not disarm all the natives and exile them on one of the less desirable continents, Antarctica for example or Siberia? They are primitive humans even as our race was once a race of primitives. It is not our duty to help to attain our own degree of knowledge and comfort?" "Only the good of the Horde matters!" shouted Torp angrily. "Shall a race of feeble-witted beasts, such as these Earthmen, stand in the way of a superior race? We want their world, and so we will take it. The Law of the Horde states that all the universe is ours for the taking." "Let us get back to Ortha at once, then," gritted out Thig savagely. "Never again do I wish to set foot upon the soil of this mad planet. There are forces at work upon Earth that we of Ortha have long forgotten." "Check the blood of Thig for disease, Kam," ordered Torp shortly. "His words are highly irrational. Some form of fever perhaps native to this world. While you examine him I will blast off for Ortha." Thig followed Kam into the tiny laboratory and found a seat beside the squat scientist's desk. His eyes roamed over the familiar instruments and gauges, each in its own precise position in the cases along the walls. His gaze lingered longest on the stubby black ugliness of a decomposition blaster in its rack close to the deck. A blast of the invisible radiations from that weapon's hot throat and flesh or vegetable fiber rotted into flaky ashes. The ship trembled beneath their feet; it tore free from the feeble clutch of the sand about it, and they were rocketing skyward. Thig's broad fingers bit deep into the unyielding metal of his chair. Suddenly he knew that he must go back to Earth, back to Ellen and the children of the man he had helped destroy. He loved Ellen, and nothing must stand between them! The Hordes of Ortha must find some other world, an empty world—this planet was not for them. "Turn back!" he cried wildly. "I must go back to Earth. There is a woman there, helpless and alone, who needs me! The Horde does not need this planet." Kam eyed him coldly and lifted a shining hypodermic syringe from its case. He approached Thig warily, aware that disease often made a maniac of the finest members of the Horde. "No human being is more important than the Horde," he stated baldly. "This woman of whom you speak is merely one unit of the millions we must eliminate for the good of the Horde." Then it was that Thig went berserk. His fists slashed into the thick jaw of the scientist and his fingers ripped at the hard cords overlying the Orthan's vital throat tubes. His fingers and thumb gouged deep into Kam's startled throat and choked off any cry for assistance before it could be uttered. Kam's hand swept down to the holster swung from his intricate harness and dragged his blaster from it. Thig's other hand clamped over his and for long moments they swayed there, locked together in silent deadly struggle. The fate of a world hung in the balance as Kam's other hand fought against that lone arm of Thig. The scales swung in favor of Kam. Slowly the flaring snout of his weapon tilted upward until it reached the level of Thig's waist. Thig suddenly released his grip and dragged his enemy toward him. A sudden reversal of pressure on Kam's gun hand sent the weapon swivelling about full upon its owner's thick torso. Thig's fingers pressed down upon Kam's button finger, down upon the stud set into the grip of the decomposition blaster, and Kam's muscles turned to water. He shrieked. Before Thig's eyes half of his comrade's body sloughed away into foul corruption that swiftly gave way to hardened blobs of dessicated matter. Horror for what he had done—that he had slain one of his own Horde—made his limbs move woodenly. All of his thoughts were dulled for the moment. Painfully slow, he turned his body around toward the control blister, turned around on leaden feet, to look full into the narrowed icy eyes of his commander. He saw the heavy barrel of the blaster slashing down against his skull but he could not swing a fraction of an inch out of the way. His body seemed paralyzed. This was the end, he thought as he waited stupidly for the blow to fall, the end for Ellen and the kids and all the struggling races of Earth. He would never write another cowboy yarn—they would all be dead anyhow soon. Then a thunderclap exploded against his head and he dropped endlessly toward the deck. Blows rained against his skull. He wondered if Torp would ever cease to hammer at him and turn the deadly ray of the weapon upon him. Blood throbbed and pounded with every blow.... Bam, Bam, Bam, the blood pounded in his ears. Like repeated blows of a hammer they shook his booming head. No longer was Torp above him. He was in the corner of the laboratory, a crumpled blood-smeared heap of bruised flesh and bone. He was unfettered and the blood was caked upon his skull and in his matted hair. Torp must have thought he had killed him with those savage blows upon the head. Even Torp, thought Thig ruefully, gave way to the primitive rage of his ancestors at times; but to that very bit of unconscious atavism he now owed his life. A cool-headed robot of an Orthan would have efficiently used the blaster to destroy any possibility of remaining life in his unconscious body. Thig rolled slowly over so that his eye found the door into the control room. Torp would be coming back again to dispose of their bodies through the refuse lock. Already the body of Kam was gone. He wondered why he had been left until last. Perhaps Torp wished to take cultures of his blood and tissues to determine whether a disease was responsible for his sudden madness. The cases of fragile instruments were just above his head. Association of memories brought him the flash of the heavy blaster in its rack beneath them. His hand went up and felt the welcome hardness of the weapon. He tugged it free. In a moment he was on his knees crawling across the plates of the deck toward the door. Halfway across the floor he collapsed on his face, the metal of the gun making a harsh clang. He heard the feet of Torp scuffle out of silence and a choked cry in the man's throat squalled out into a senseless whinny. Thig raised himself up on a quivering elbow and slid the black length of the blaster in front of him. His eyes sought the doorway and stared full into the glaring vacant orbs of his commander. Torp leaned there watching him, his breath gurgling brokenly through his deep-bitten lips. The clawing marks of nails, fingernails, furrowed his face and chest. He was a madman! The deadly attack of Thig; his own violent avenging of Kam's death, and now the apparent return of the man he had killed come to life had all served to jolt his rigidly trained brain from its accustomed groove. The shock had been too much for the established thought-processes of the Orthan. So Thig shot him where he stood, mercifully, before that vacant mad stare set him, too, to gibbering and shrieking. Then he stepped over the skeleton-thing that had been Torp, using the new strength that victory had given him to drive him along. He had saved a world's civilization from extinction! The thought sobered him; yet, somehow, he was pleased that he had done so. After all, it had been the Earthwoman and the children he had been thinking of while he battled Kam, a selfish desire to protect them all. He went to the desk where Torp had been writing in the ship's log and read the last few nervously scrawled lines: Planet 72-P-3 unfit for colonization. Some pernicious disease that strikes at the brain centers and causes violent insanity is existent there. Thig, just returned from a survey of the planet, went mad and destroyed Kam. In turn I was forced to slay him. But it is not ended. Already I feel the insidious virus of.... And there his writing ended abruptly. Thig nodded. That would do it. He set the automatic pilot for the planet Ortha. Unless a rogue asteroid or a comet crossed the ship's path she would return safely to Ortha with that mute warning of danger on 72-P-3. The body of Torp would help to confirm his final message. Then Thig crossed the cabin to the auxiliary life boat there, one of a half-dozen space ships in miniature nested within the great ship's hull, and cut free from the mother vessel. He flipped the drive lever, felt the thrumming of the rockets driving him from the parent ship. The sensation of free flight against his new body was strangely exhilerating and heady. It was the newest of the emotions he had experienced on Earth since that day, so many months before, when he had felt the warmness of Ellen's lips tight against his. Thig flipped the drive lever, felt the thrumming of the rockets driving him from the parent ship. He swung about to the port, watched the flaming drive-rockets of the great exploratory ship hurl it toward far-away Ortha, and there was no regret in his mind that he was not returning to the planet of his first existence. He thought of the dull greys and blacks of his planet, of the monotonous routine of existence that had once been his—and his heart thrilled to the memories of the starry nights and perfect exciting days he had spent on his three month trip over Earth. He made a brief salute to the existence he had known, turned with a tiny sigh, and his fingers made brief adjustments in the controls. The rocket-thrum deepened, and the thin whistle of tenuous air clutching the ship echoed through the hull-plates. He thought of many things in those few moments. He watched the roundness of Earth flatten out, then take on the cup-like illusion that all planets had for an incoming ship. He reduced the drive of his rockets to a mere whisper, striving to control the impatience that crowded his mind. He shivered suddenly, remembering his utter callousness the first time he had sent a space ship whipping down toward the hills and valleys below. And there was a sickness within him when he fully realized that, despite his acquired memory and traits, he was an alien from outer space. He fingered the tiny scars that had completely obliterated the slight differences in his appearance from an Earthman's, and his fingers trembled a bit, as he bent and stared through the vision port. He said a brief prayer in his heart to a God whose presence he now felt very deeply. There were tears in the depths of his eyes, then, and memories were hot, bitter pains. Earth was not far below him. As he let gravity suck him earthward, he heaved a gasp of relief. He was no longer Thig, a creature of a Horde's creation, but Lewis Terry, writer of lurid gun-smoking tales of the West. He must remember that always. He had destroyed the real Terry and now, for the rest of his life, he must make up to the dead man's family. The knowledge that Ellen's love was not really meant for him would be a knife twisting in his heart but for her sake he must endure it. Her dreams and happiness must never be shattered. The bulge of Earth was flattening out now and he could see the outlines of Long Island in the growing twilight. A new plot was growing in the brain of Lewis Terry, a yarn about a cowboy suddenly transported to another world. He smiled ironically. He had seen those other worlds. Perhaps some day he would write about them.... He was Lewis Terry! He must remember that!

How do the ways of Ortha differ from those Thig discovers on Earth?

8

The Orthans are a race totally committed to the advancement of the Horde, which travels around the universe seeking to find new planets to overthrow and inhabit. Over the years, their minds have been programmed to think only of the good of the Horde, with no thought to sentimental emotions or feelings. When Thig receives Lewis Terry’s mind, he also receives his mentality, his thoughts, his memories, and his emotions. He experiences for the first time how humans feel. He describes the warmth of hugging Lew’s children, and the choking-warm sensation of kissing his wife, Ellen. He feels awe when standing before the Grand Canyon and learns to feel excitement about the unpredictability of human behavior and emotion. He feels love, hate, and sadness. All of these emotions stand in stark contrast to the Orthan way of life, which is carefully regimented and devoid of any of these kinds of feelings.

62198

QUEST OF THIG By BASIL WELLS Thig of Ortha was the vanguard of the conquering "HORDE." He had blasted across trackless space to subdue a defenseless world—only to meet on Earth emotions that were more deadly than weapons. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Thig carefully smoothed the dark sand and seaweed of the lonely beach over the metal lid of the flexible ringed tunnel that linked the grubby ship from another planet with the upper air. He looked out across the heaving waters of the Sound toward Connecticut. He stared appraisingly around at the luxuriant green growth of foliage further inland; and started toward the little stretch of trees and brush, walking carefully because of the lesser gravitation. Thig was shorter than the average Earthman—although on Ortha he was well above the average in height—but his body was thick and powerfully muscled. His skull was well-shaped and large; his features were regular, perhaps a trifle oversize, and his hair and eyes were a curiously matching blend of reddish brown. Oddest of all, he wore no garments, other than the necessary belt and straps to support his rod-like weapon of white metal and his pouches for food and specimens. The Orthan entered the narrow strip of trees and crossed to the little-used highway on the other side. Here he patiently sat down to wait for an Earthman or an Earthwoman to pass. His task now was to bring a native, intact if possible, back to the carefully buried space cruiser where his two fellows and himself would drain the creature's mentality of all its knowledge. In this way they could learn whether a planet was suited for colonization by later swarms of Orthans. Already they had charted over a hundred celestial bodies but of them all only three had proven worthy of consideration. This latest planet, however, 72-P-3 on the chart, appeared to be an ideal world in every respect. Sunlight, plenty of water and a dense atmospheric envelope made of 72-P-3 a paradise among planets. The explorer from another world crouched into the concealment of a leafy shrub. A creature was approaching. Its squat body was covered with baggy strips of bluish cloth and it carried a jointed rod of metal and wood in its paw. It walked upright as did the men of Ortha. Thig's cold eyes opened a trifle wider as he stared into the thing's stupid face. It was as though he was looking into a bit of polished metal at the reflection of himself! The Earthman was opposite now and he must waste no more precious time. The mighty muscles of the Orthan sent him hurtling across the intervening space in two prodigious bounds, and his hands clamped across the mouth and neck of the stranger.... Lewis Terry was going fishing. For a week the typewriter mill that had ground out a thousand assorted yarns of the untamed West and the frigid desolation of the Northwoods had been silent. Lewis wondered if he was going stale. He had sat every day for eight hours in front of that shiny-buttoned bane of the typist, but there were no results. Feebly he had punched a key two days ago and a $ sign had appeared. He hadn't dared touch the machine since. For Mr. Terry, that hard-hitting writer of two-gun action, had never been further west of Long Island than Elizabeth, and he had promised his wife, Ellen, that he would take the three children and herself on a trailer tour of the West that very summer. Since that promise, he could not write a word. Visions of whooping red-skinned Apaches and be-chapped outlaws raiding his little trailer home kept rolling up out of his subconscious. Yet he had to write at least three novelets and a fistful of short stories in the next two weeks to finance the great adventure—or the trip was off. So Lewis left the weathered old cottage in the early dawn and headed for his tubby old boat at the landing in an attempt to work out a salable yarn.... "Hey!" he shouted as a naked man sprang out of the bushes beside the road. "What's the trouble?" Then he had no time for further speech, the massive arms of the stranger had wound around him and two hamlike hands shut off his speech and his wind. He fought futilely against trained muscles. The hand clamping his throat relaxed for a moment and hacked along the side of his head. Blackness flooded the brain of Lewis, and he knew no more. "There it is," announced Thig, dropping the limp body of the captured Earthman to the metal deck-plates. "It is a male of the species that must have built the cities we saw as we landed." "He resembles Thig," announced Kam. "But for the strange covering he wears he might be Thig." "Thig will be this creature!" announced Torp. "With a psychic relay we will transfer the Earthman's memories and meager store of knowledge to the brain of Thig! He can then go out and scout this world without arousing suspicion. While he is gone, I will take Kam and explore the two inner planets." "You are the commander," said Thig. "But I wish this beast did not wear these clumsy sheathing upon his body. On Ortha we do not hamper the use of our limbs so." "Do not question the word of your commander," growled Torp, swelling out his thick chest menacingly. "It is for the good of our people that you disguise yourself as an Earthman." "For the good of the Horde," Thig intoned almost piously as he lifted Terry's body and headed for the laboratory. Service for the Horde was all that the men of Ortha knew. Carefully cultured and brought to life in the laboratories of their Horde, they knew neither father nor mother. Affection and love were entirely lacking in their early training and later life. They were trained antlike from childhood that only the growth and power of the Horde were of any moment. Men and women alike toiled and died like unfeeling robots of flesh and bone for the Horde. The Horde was their religion, their love-life, their everything! So it was that the bodies of the Earthman and the Orthan were strapped on two parallel tables of chill metal and the twin helmets, linked to one another by the intricacies of the psychic relay, put upon their heads. For ten hours or more the droning hum of the relay sucked Terry's brain dry of knowledge. The shock upon the nervous system of the Earthman proved too violent and his heart faltered after a time and stopped completely. Twice, with subtle drugs they restored pseudo-life to his body and kept the electrical impulses throbbing from his tortured brain, but after the third suspension of life Thig removed his helmet. "There is nothing more to learn," he informed his impassive comrades. "Now, let us get on with the plastic surgery that is required. My new body must return to its barbaric household before undue attention is aroused. And when I return I will take along some of the gleaming baubles we found on the red planet—these people value them highly." An hour later, his scars and altered cartilage already healed and painless, Thig again scraped sand over the entrance to the space ship and set out along the moonlit beach toward the nearest path running inland to his home. Memory was laying the country bare about him, Terry's own childhood memories of this particular section of Long Island. Here was the place where Jake and Ted had helped him dig for the buried treasure that old 'Notch-ear' Beggs had told them so exactly about. Remembrance of that episode gave Thig an idea about the little lump of jewels in his pocket. He had found them in a chest along the beach! He was coming up on the porch now and at the sound of his foot on the sagging boards the screen door burst open and three little Earth-creatures were hugging at his legs. An odd sensation, that his acquired memories labeled as pleasure, sent a warm glow upward from around his heart. Then he saw the slender red-haired shape of a woman, the mate of the dead man he knew, and confusion struck his well-trained brain. Men had no mates on Ortha, sex had been overthrown with all the other primitive impulses of barbarism; so he was incapable of understanding the emotions that swept through his acquired memory. Unsteadily he took her in his arms and felt her warm lips pressed, trembling, against his own. That same hot wave of pulsing blood choked achingly up into his throat. "Lew, dear," Ellen was asking, "where have you been all day? I called up at the landing but you were not there. I wanted to let you know that Saddlebag Publications sent a check for $50 for "Reversed Revolvers" and three other editors asked for shorts soon." "Shoulda got a hundred bucks for that yarn," grunted Thig, and gasped. For the moment he had been Lewis Terry and not Thig! So thoroughly had he acquired the knowledge of Terry that he found himself unconsciously adopting the thinking and mannerism of the other. All the better this way, he realized—more natural. "Sorry I was late," he said, digging into his pocket for the glittering baubles, "but I was poking around on the beach where we used to hunt treasure and I found an old chest. Inside it I found nothing but a handful of these." He flashed the jewels in front of Ellen's startled eyes and she clung, unbelieving, to his arm. "Why, Lew," she gasped, "they're worth a fortune! We can buy that new trailer now and have a rebuilt motor in the car. We can go west right away.... Hollywood, the Grand Canyon, cowboys!" "Uh huh," agreed the pseudo Lewis, memories of the ferocious savages and gunmen of his stories rendering him acutely unhappy. Sincerely he hoped that the west had reformed. "I saved some kraut and weiners," Ellen said. "Get washed up while I'm warming them up. Kids ate all the bread so I had to borrow some from the Eskoes. Want coffee, too?" "Mmmmmm," came from the depths of the chipped white wash-basin. "Home again," whispered Ellen as she stood beside Thig twelve weeks later and gazed tearfully at the weathered little gray house. She knelt beside the front stoop and reached for the key hidden beneath it. "The west was wonderful; tremendous, vast and beautiful," she went on as they climbed the steps, "but nowhere was there any place as beautiful as our own little strip of sky and water." Thig sank into a dusty old swing that hung on creaking chains from the exposed rafters of the porch roof. He looked down at the dusty gray car and the bulbous silvery bulk of the trailer that had been their living quarters for almost three months. Strange thoughts were afloat in the chaos of his cool Orthan brain. Tonight or tomorrow night at the latest he must contact his two fellows and report that Earth was a planetary paradise. No other world, including Ortha, was so well-favored and rich. An expeditionary force to wipe the grotesque civilizations of Earth out of existence would, of course, be necessary before the first units of new Hordes could be landed. And there Thig balked. Why must they destroy these people, imperfect though their civilization might be, to make room for the Hordes? Thig tried to tell himself that it was the transmitted thoughts of the dead Earthman that made him feel so, but he was not too sure. For three months he had lived with people who loved, hated, wept and sacrificed for reasons that he had never known existed. He had learned the heady glory of thinking for himself and making his own decisions. He had experienced the primitive joy of matching his wits and tongue against the wits of other unpredictable human beings. There was no abrupt division of men and women into definite classes of endeavor. A laborer thought the same thoughts that a governor might think. Uncertainty added zest to every day's life. The Orthan had come to question the sole devotion of the individual to the Horde to the exclusion of all other interests. What, he wondered, would one new world—or a hundred—populated by the Hordes add to the progress of humanity? For a hundred thousand years the Orthan civilization had remained static, its energies directed into certain well-defined channels. They were mindless bees maintaining their vast mechanical hives. There was that moment on the brink of the Grand Canyon when Ellen had caught his arm breathlessly at all the beauty spread away there beneath them. There were mornings in the desert when the sun painted in lurid red the peaks above the harsh black-and-whites of the sagebrush and cactus slopes. There was the little boy, his body burning with fever, who nestled trustingly against his tense man's body and slept—the son of Ellen and the man he had destroyed. Thig groaned. He was a weakling to let sentimentality so get the better of his judgment. He would go now to the space ship and urge them to blast off for Ortha. He sprang off the porch and strode away down the road toward the beach. The children ran to him; wanted to go along. He sent them away harshly but they smiled and waved their brown little hands. Ellen came to the door and called after him. "Hurry home, dear," she said. "I'll have a bite ready in about an hour." He dared not say anything, for his voice would have broken and she would have known something was wrong. She was a very wise sort of person when something was troubling him. He waved his stubby paw of a hand to show that he had heard, and blindly hurried toward the Sound. Oddly enough, as he hurried away along the narrow path through the autumn woods, his mind busied itself with a new epic of the west that lived no longer. He mentally titled it: "Rustlers' Riot" and blocked in the outlines of his plot. One section of his brain was that of the careless author of gunslinging yarns, a section that seemed to be sapping the life from his own brain. He knew that the story would never be written, but he toyed with the idea. So far had Thig the emotionless, robot-being from Ortha drifted from the unquestioning worship of the Horde! "You have done well," announced Torp when Thig had completed his report on the resources and temperatures of various sections of Terra. "We now have located three worlds fit for colonization and so we will return to Ortha at once. "I will recommend the conquest of this planet, 72-P-3 at once and the complete destruction of all biped life upon it. The mental aberrations of the barbaric natives might lead to endless complications if they were permitted to exist outside our ordered way of life. I imagine that three circuits of the planet about its primary should prove sufficient for the purposes of complete liquidation." "But why," asked Thig slowly, "could we not disarm all the natives and exile them on one of the less desirable continents, Antarctica for example or Siberia? They are primitive humans even as our race was once a race of primitives. It is not our duty to help to attain our own degree of knowledge and comfort?" "Only the good of the Horde matters!" shouted Torp angrily. "Shall a race of feeble-witted beasts, such as these Earthmen, stand in the way of a superior race? We want their world, and so we will take it. The Law of the Horde states that all the universe is ours for the taking." "Let us get back to Ortha at once, then," gritted out Thig savagely. "Never again do I wish to set foot upon the soil of this mad planet. There are forces at work upon Earth that we of Ortha have long forgotten." "Check the blood of Thig for disease, Kam," ordered Torp shortly. "His words are highly irrational. Some form of fever perhaps native to this world. While you examine him I will blast off for Ortha." Thig followed Kam into the tiny laboratory and found a seat beside the squat scientist's desk. His eyes roamed over the familiar instruments and gauges, each in its own precise position in the cases along the walls. His gaze lingered longest on the stubby black ugliness of a decomposition blaster in its rack close to the deck. A blast of the invisible radiations from that weapon's hot throat and flesh or vegetable fiber rotted into flaky ashes. The ship trembled beneath their feet; it tore free from the feeble clutch of the sand about it, and they were rocketing skyward. Thig's broad fingers bit deep into the unyielding metal of his chair. Suddenly he knew that he must go back to Earth, back to Ellen and the children of the man he had helped destroy. He loved Ellen, and nothing must stand between them! The Hordes of Ortha must find some other world, an empty world—this planet was not for them. "Turn back!" he cried wildly. "I must go back to Earth. There is a woman there, helpless and alone, who needs me! The Horde does not need this planet." Kam eyed him coldly and lifted a shining hypodermic syringe from its case. He approached Thig warily, aware that disease often made a maniac of the finest members of the Horde. "No human being is more important than the Horde," he stated baldly. "This woman of whom you speak is merely one unit of the millions we must eliminate for the good of the Horde." Then it was that Thig went berserk. His fists slashed into the thick jaw of the scientist and his fingers ripped at the hard cords overlying the Orthan's vital throat tubes. His fingers and thumb gouged deep into Kam's startled throat and choked off any cry for assistance before it could be uttered. Kam's hand swept down to the holster swung from his intricate harness and dragged his blaster from it. Thig's other hand clamped over his and for long moments they swayed there, locked together in silent deadly struggle. The fate of a world hung in the balance as Kam's other hand fought against that lone arm of Thig. The scales swung in favor of Kam. Slowly the flaring snout of his weapon tilted upward until it reached the level of Thig's waist. Thig suddenly released his grip and dragged his enemy toward him. A sudden reversal of pressure on Kam's gun hand sent the weapon swivelling about full upon its owner's thick torso. Thig's fingers pressed down upon Kam's button finger, down upon the stud set into the grip of the decomposition blaster, and Kam's muscles turned to water. He shrieked. Before Thig's eyes half of his comrade's body sloughed away into foul corruption that swiftly gave way to hardened blobs of dessicated matter. Horror for what he had done—that he had slain one of his own Horde—made his limbs move woodenly. All of his thoughts were dulled for the moment. Painfully slow, he turned his body around toward the control blister, turned around on leaden feet, to look full into the narrowed icy eyes of his commander. He saw the heavy barrel of the blaster slashing down against his skull but he could not swing a fraction of an inch out of the way. His body seemed paralyzed. This was the end, he thought as he waited stupidly for the blow to fall, the end for Ellen and the kids and all the struggling races of Earth. He would never write another cowboy yarn—they would all be dead anyhow soon. Then a thunderclap exploded against his head and he dropped endlessly toward the deck. Blows rained against his skull. He wondered if Torp would ever cease to hammer at him and turn the deadly ray of the weapon upon him. Blood throbbed and pounded with every blow.... Bam, Bam, Bam, the blood pounded in his ears. Like repeated blows of a hammer they shook his booming head. No longer was Torp above him. He was in the corner of the laboratory, a crumpled blood-smeared heap of bruised flesh and bone. He was unfettered and the blood was caked upon his skull and in his matted hair. Torp must have thought he had killed him with those savage blows upon the head. Even Torp, thought Thig ruefully, gave way to the primitive rage of his ancestors at times; but to that very bit of unconscious atavism he now owed his life. A cool-headed robot of an Orthan would have efficiently used the blaster to destroy any possibility of remaining life in his unconscious body. Thig rolled slowly over so that his eye found the door into the control room. Torp would be coming back again to dispose of their bodies through the refuse lock. Already the body of Kam was gone. He wondered why he had been left until last. Perhaps Torp wished to take cultures of his blood and tissues to determine whether a disease was responsible for his sudden madness. The cases of fragile instruments were just above his head. Association of memories brought him the flash of the heavy blaster in its rack beneath them. His hand went up and felt the welcome hardness of the weapon. He tugged it free. In a moment he was on his knees crawling across the plates of the deck toward the door. Halfway across the floor he collapsed on his face, the metal of the gun making a harsh clang. He heard the feet of Torp scuffle out of silence and a choked cry in the man's throat squalled out into a senseless whinny. Thig raised himself up on a quivering elbow and slid the black length of the blaster in front of him. His eyes sought the doorway and stared full into the glaring vacant orbs of his commander. Torp leaned there watching him, his breath gurgling brokenly through his deep-bitten lips. The clawing marks of nails, fingernails, furrowed his face and chest. He was a madman! The deadly attack of Thig; his own violent avenging of Kam's death, and now the apparent return of the man he had killed come to life had all served to jolt his rigidly trained brain from its accustomed groove. The shock had been too much for the established thought-processes of the Orthan. So Thig shot him where he stood, mercifully, before that vacant mad stare set him, too, to gibbering and shrieking. Then he stepped over the skeleton-thing that had been Torp, using the new strength that victory had given him to drive him along. He had saved a world's civilization from extinction! The thought sobered him; yet, somehow, he was pleased that he had done so. After all, it had been the Earthwoman and the children he had been thinking of while he battled Kam, a selfish desire to protect them all. He went to the desk where Torp had been writing in the ship's log and read the last few nervously scrawled lines: Planet 72-P-3 unfit for colonization. Some pernicious disease that strikes at the brain centers and causes violent insanity is existent there. Thig, just returned from a survey of the planet, went mad and destroyed Kam. In turn I was forced to slay him. But it is not ended. Already I feel the insidious virus of.... And there his writing ended abruptly. Thig nodded. That would do it. He set the automatic pilot for the planet Ortha. Unless a rogue asteroid or a comet crossed the ship's path she would return safely to Ortha with that mute warning of danger on 72-P-3. The body of Torp would help to confirm his final message. Then Thig crossed the cabin to the auxiliary life boat there, one of a half-dozen space ships in miniature nested within the great ship's hull, and cut free from the mother vessel. He flipped the drive lever, felt the thrumming of the rockets driving him from the parent ship. The sensation of free flight against his new body was strangely exhilerating and heady. It was the newest of the emotions he had experienced on Earth since that day, so many months before, when he had felt the warmness of Ellen's lips tight against his. Thig flipped the drive lever, felt the thrumming of the rockets driving him from the parent ship. He swung about to the port, watched the flaming drive-rockets of the great exploratory ship hurl it toward far-away Ortha, and there was no regret in his mind that he was not returning to the planet of his first existence. He thought of the dull greys and blacks of his planet, of the monotonous routine of existence that had once been his—and his heart thrilled to the memories of the starry nights and perfect exciting days he had spent on his three month trip over Earth. He made a brief salute to the existence he had known, turned with a tiny sigh, and his fingers made brief adjustments in the controls. The rocket-thrum deepened, and the thin whistle of tenuous air clutching the ship echoed through the hull-plates. He thought of many things in those few moments. He watched the roundness of Earth flatten out, then take on the cup-like illusion that all planets had for an incoming ship. He reduced the drive of his rockets to a mere whisper, striving to control the impatience that crowded his mind. He shivered suddenly, remembering his utter callousness the first time he had sent a space ship whipping down toward the hills and valleys below. And there was a sickness within him when he fully realized that, despite his acquired memory and traits, he was an alien from outer space. He fingered the tiny scars that had completely obliterated the slight differences in his appearance from an Earthman's, and his fingers trembled a bit, as he bent and stared through the vision port. He said a brief prayer in his heart to a God whose presence he now felt very deeply. There were tears in the depths of his eyes, then, and memories were hot, bitter pains. Earth was not far below him. As he let gravity suck him earthward, he heaved a gasp of relief. He was no longer Thig, a creature of a Horde's creation, but Lewis Terry, writer of lurid gun-smoking tales of the West. He must remember that always. He had destroyed the real Terry and now, for the rest of his life, he must make up to the dead man's family. The knowledge that Ellen's love was not really meant for him would be a knife twisting in his heart but for her sake he must endure it. Her dreams and happiness must never be shattered. The bulge of Earth was flattening out now and he could see the outlines of Long Island in the growing twilight. A new plot was growing in the brain of Lewis Terry, a yarn about a cowboy suddenly transported to another world. He smiled ironically. He had seen those other worlds. Perhaps some day he would write about them.... He was Lewis Terry! He must remember that!

How do the ways of Ortha differ from those Thig discovers on Earth?

1

On Ortha, the aliens are raised in the laboratories of their Horde. The Orthans function in a collective society. They do not believe in the individual. There are no families, no romantic relationships or sex, and no friends. Everything that is done must be done for the greater society, much like an ant farm. The Orthans are looking for a new planet to colonize, and they send out Torp, Kam, and Thig on the mission. Orthans are incapable of feeling emotions and all of their primitive impulses have been done away with. The aliens are part of a strict caste system where they are only allowed to have certain thoughts according to their position in the Horde. They have acted this way for over one hundred thousand years. Orthans believe they are superior to Earthmen, whom they see as feeble and weak. They believe they have the right to take whatever planet is best for them, and killing billions of Earthmen means nothing to them.

62198

QUEST OF THIG By BASIL WELLS Thig of Ortha was the vanguard of the conquering "HORDE." He had blasted across trackless space to subdue a defenseless world—only to meet on Earth emotions that were more deadly than weapons. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Thig carefully smoothed the dark sand and seaweed of the lonely beach over the metal lid of the flexible ringed tunnel that linked the grubby ship from another planet with the upper air. He looked out across the heaving waters of the Sound toward Connecticut. He stared appraisingly around at the luxuriant green growth of foliage further inland; and started toward the little stretch of trees and brush, walking carefully because of the lesser gravitation. Thig was shorter than the average Earthman—although on Ortha he was well above the average in height—but his body was thick and powerfully muscled. His skull was well-shaped and large; his features were regular, perhaps a trifle oversize, and his hair and eyes were a curiously matching blend of reddish brown. Oddest of all, he wore no garments, other than the necessary belt and straps to support his rod-like weapon of white metal and his pouches for food and specimens. The Orthan entered the narrow strip of trees and crossed to the little-used highway on the other side. Here he patiently sat down to wait for an Earthman or an Earthwoman to pass. His task now was to bring a native, intact if possible, back to the carefully buried space cruiser where his two fellows and himself would drain the creature's mentality of all its knowledge. In this way they could learn whether a planet was suited for colonization by later swarms of Orthans. Already they had charted over a hundred celestial bodies but of them all only three had proven worthy of consideration. This latest planet, however, 72-P-3 on the chart, appeared to be an ideal world in every respect. Sunlight, plenty of water and a dense atmospheric envelope made of 72-P-3 a paradise among planets. The explorer from another world crouched into the concealment of a leafy shrub. A creature was approaching. Its squat body was covered with baggy strips of bluish cloth and it carried a jointed rod of metal and wood in its paw. It walked upright as did the men of Ortha. Thig's cold eyes opened a trifle wider as he stared into the thing's stupid face. It was as though he was looking into a bit of polished metal at the reflection of himself! The Earthman was opposite now and he must waste no more precious time. The mighty muscles of the Orthan sent him hurtling across the intervening space in two prodigious bounds, and his hands clamped across the mouth and neck of the stranger.... Lewis Terry was going fishing. For a week the typewriter mill that had ground out a thousand assorted yarns of the untamed West and the frigid desolation of the Northwoods had been silent. Lewis wondered if he was going stale. He had sat every day for eight hours in front of that shiny-buttoned bane of the typist, but there were no results. Feebly he had punched a key two days ago and a $ sign had appeared. He hadn't dared touch the machine since. For Mr. Terry, that hard-hitting writer of two-gun action, had never been further west of Long Island than Elizabeth, and he had promised his wife, Ellen, that he would take the three children and herself on a trailer tour of the West that very summer. Since that promise, he could not write a word. Visions of whooping red-skinned Apaches and be-chapped outlaws raiding his little trailer home kept rolling up out of his subconscious. Yet he had to write at least three novelets and a fistful of short stories in the next two weeks to finance the great adventure—or the trip was off. So Lewis left the weathered old cottage in the early dawn and headed for his tubby old boat at the landing in an attempt to work out a salable yarn.... "Hey!" he shouted as a naked man sprang out of the bushes beside the road. "What's the trouble?" Then he had no time for further speech, the massive arms of the stranger had wound around him and two hamlike hands shut off his speech and his wind. He fought futilely against trained muscles. The hand clamping his throat relaxed for a moment and hacked along the side of his head. Blackness flooded the brain of Lewis, and he knew no more. "There it is," announced Thig, dropping the limp body of the captured Earthman to the metal deck-plates. "It is a male of the species that must have built the cities we saw as we landed." "He resembles Thig," announced Kam. "But for the strange covering he wears he might be Thig." "Thig will be this creature!" announced Torp. "With a psychic relay we will transfer the Earthman's memories and meager store of knowledge to the brain of Thig! He can then go out and scout this world without arousing suspicion. While he is gone, I will take Kam and explore the two inner planets." "You are the commander," said Thig. "But I wish this beast did not wear these clumsy sheathing upon his body. On Ortha we do not hamper the use of our limbs so." "Do not question the word of your commander," growled Torp, swelling out his thick chest menacingly. "It is for the good of our people that you disguise yourself as an Earthman." "For the good of the Horde," Thig intoned almost piously as he lifted Terry's body and headed for the laboratory. Service for the Horde was all that the men of Ortha knew. Carefully cultured and brought to life in the laboratories of their Horde, they knew neither father nor mother. Affection and love were entirely lacking in their early training and later life. They were trained antlike from childhood that only the growth and power of the Horde were of any moment. Men and women alike toiled and died like unfeeling robots of flesh and bone for the Horde. The Horde was their religion, their love-life, their everything! So it was that the bodies of the Earthman and the Orthan were strapped on two parallel tables of chill metal and the twin helmets, linked to one another by the intricacies of the psychic relay, put upon their heads. For ten hours or more the droning hum of the relay sucked Terry's brain dry of knowledge. The shock upon the nervous system of the Earthman proved too violent and his heart faltered after a time and stopped completely. Twice, with subtle drugs they restored pseudo-life to his body and kept the electrical impulses throbbing from his tortured brain, but after the third suspension of life Thig removed his helmet. "There is nothing more to learn," he informed his impassive comrades. "Now, let us get on with the plastic surgery that is required. My new body must return to its barbaric household before undue attention is aroused. And when I return I will take along some of the gleaming baubles we found on the red planet—these people value them highly." An hour later, his scars and altered cartilage already healed and painless, Thig again scraped sand over the entrance to the space ship and set out along the moonlit beach toward the nearest path running inland to his home. Memory was laying the country bare about him, Terry's own childhood memories of this particular section of Long Island. Here was the place where Jake and Ted had helped him dig for the buried treasure that old 'Notch-ear' Beggs had told them so exactly about. Remembrance of that episode gave Thig an idea about the little lump of jewels in his pocket. He had found them in a chest along the beach! He was coming up on the porch now and at the sound of his foot on the sagging boards the screen door burst open and three little Earth-creatures were hugging at his legs. An odd sensation, that his acquired memories labeled as pleasure, sent a warm glow upward from around his heart. Then he saw the slender red-haired shape of a woman, the mate of the dead man he knew, and confusion struck his well-trained brain. Men had no mates on Ortha, sex had been overthrown with all the other primitive impulses of barbarism; so he was incapable of understanding the emotions that swept through his acquired memory. Unsteadily he took her in his arms and felt her warm lips pressed, trembling, against his own. That same hot wave of pulsing blood choked achingly up into his throat. "Lew, dear," Ellen was asking, "where have you been all day? I called up at the landing but you were not there. I wanted to let you know that Saddlebag Publications sent a check for $50 for "Reversed Revolvers" and three other editors asked for shorts soon." "Shoulda got a hundred bucks for that yarn," grunted Thig, and gasped. For the moment he had been Lewis Terry and not Thig! So thoroughly had he acquired the knowledge of Terry that he found himself unconsciously adopting the thinking and mannerism of the other. All the better this way, he realized—more natural. "Sorry I was late," he said, digging into his pocket for the glittering baubles, "but I was poking around on the beach where we used to hunt treasure and I found an old chest. Inside it I found nothing but a handful of these." He flashed the jewels in front of Ellen's startled eyes and she clung, unbelieving, to his arm. "Why, Lew," she gasped, "they're worth a fortune! We can buy that new trailer now and have a rebuilt motor in the car. We can go west right away.... Hollywood, the Grand Canyon, cowboys!" "Uh huh," agreed the pseudo Lewis, memories of the ferocious savages and gunmen of his stories rendering him acutely unhappy. Sincerely he hoped that the west had reformed. "I saved some kraut and weiners," Ellen said. "Get washed up while I'm warming them up. Kids ate all the bread so I had to borrow some from the Eskoes. Want coffee, too?" "Mmmmmm," came from the depths of the chipped white wash-basin. "Home again," whispered Ellen as she stood beside Thig twelve weeks later and gazed tearfully at the weathered little gray house. She knelt beside the front stoop and reached for the key hidden beneath it. "The west was wonderful; tremendous, vast and beautiful," she went on as they climbed the steps, "but nowhere was there any place as beautiful as our own little strip of sky and water." Thig sank into a dusty old swing that hung on creaking chains from the exposed rafters of the porch roof. He looked down at the dusty gray car and the bulbous silvery bulk of the trailer that had been their living quarters for almost three months. Strange thoughts were afloat in the chaos of his cool Orthan brain. Tonight or tomorrow night at the latest he must contact his two fellows and report that Earth was a planetary paradise. No other world, including Ortha, was so well-favored and rich. An expeditionary force to wipe the grotesque civilizations of Earth out of existence would, of course, be necessary before the first units of new Hordes could be landed. And there Thig balked. Why must they destroy these people, imperfect though their civilization might be, to make room for the Hordes? Thig tried to tell himself that it was the transmitted thoughts of the dead Earthman that made him feel so, but he was not too sure. For three months he had lived with people who loved, hated, wept and sacrificed for reasons that he had never known existed. He had learned the heady glory of thinking for himself and making his own decisions. He had experienced the primitive joy of matching his wits and tongue against the wits of other unpredictable human beings. There was no abrupt division of men and women into definite classes of endeavor. A laborer thought the same thoughts that a governor might think. Uncertainty added zest to every day's life. The Orthan had come to question the sole devotion of the individual to the Horde to the exclusion of all other interests. What, he wondered, would one new world—or a hundred—populated by the Hordes add to the progress of humanity? For a hundred thousand years the Orthan civilization had remained static, its energies directed into certain well-defined channels. They were mindless bees maintaining their vast mechanical hives. There was that moment on the brink of the Grand Canyon when Ellen had caught his arm breathlessly at all the beauty spread away there beneath them. There were mornings in the desert when the sun painted in lurid red the peaks above the harsh black-and-whites of the sagebrush and cactus slopes. There was the little boy, his body burning with fever, who nestled trustingly against his tense man's body and slept—the son of Ellen and the man he had destroyed. Thig groaned. He was a weakling to let sentimentality so get the better of his judgment. He would go now to the space ship and urge them to blast off for Ortha. He sprang off the porch and strode away down the road toward the beach. The children ran to him; wanted to go along. He sent them away harshly but they smiled and waved their brown little hands. Ellen came to the door and called after him. "Hurry home, dear," she said. "I'll have a bite ready in about an hour." He dared not say anything, for his voice would have broken and she would have known something was wrong. She was a very wise sort of person when something was troubling him. He waved his stubby paw of a hand to show that he had heard, and blindly hurried toward the Sound. Oddly enough, as he hurried away along the narrow path through the autumn woods, his mind busied itself with a new epic of the west that lived no longer. He mentally titled it: "Rustlers' Riot" and blocked in the outlines of his plot. One section of his brain was that of the careless author of gunslinging yarns, a section that seemed to be sapping the life from his own brain. He knew that the story would never be written, but he toyed with the idea. So far had Thig the emotionless, robot-being from Ortha drifted from the unquestioning worship of the Horde! "You have done well," announced Torp when Thig had completed his report on the resources and temperatures of various sections of Terra. "We now have located three worlds fit for colonization and so we will return to Ortha at once. "I will recommend the conquest of this planet, 72-P-3 at once and the complete destruction of all biped life upon it. The mental aberrations of the barbaric natives might lead to endless complications if they were permitted to exist outside our ordered way of life. I imagine that three circuits of the planet about its primary should prove sufficient for the purposes of complete liquidation." "But why," asked Thig slowly, "could we not disarm all the natives and exile them on one of the less desirable continents, Antarctica for example or Siberia? They are primitive humans even as our race was once a race of primitives. It is not our duty to help to attain our own degree of knowledge and comfort?" "Only the good of the Horde matters!" shouted Torp angrily. "Shall a race of feeble-witted beasts, such as these Earthmen, stand in the way of a superior race? We want their world, and so we will take it. The Law of the Horde states that all the universe is ours for the taking." "Let us get back to Ortha at once, then," gritted out Thig savagely. "Never again do I wish to set foot upon the soil of this mad planet. There are forces at work upon Earth that we of Ortha have long forgotten." "Check the blood of Thig for disease, Kam," ordered Torp shortly. "His words are highly irrational. Some form of fever perhaps native to this world. While you examine him I will blast off for Ortha." Thig followed Kam into the tiny laboratory and found a seat beside the squat scientist's desk. His eyes roamed over the familiar instruments and gauges, each in its own precise position in the cases along the walls. His gaze lingered longest on the stubby black ugliness of a decomposition blaster in its rack close to the deck. A blast of the invisible radiations from that weapon's hot throat and flesh or vegetable fiber rotted into flaky ashes. The ship trembled beneath their feet; it tore free from the feeble clutch of the sand about it, and they were rocketing skyward. Thig's broad fingers bit deep into the unyielding metal of his chair. Suddenly he knew that he must go back to Earth, back to Ellen and the children of the man he had helped destroy. He loved Ellen, and nothing must stand between them! The Hordes of Ortha must find some other world, an empty world—this planet was not for them. "Turn back!" he cried wildly. "I must go back to Earth. There is a woman there, helpless and alone, who needs me! The Horde does not need this planet." Kam eyed him coldly and lifted a shining hypodermic syringe from its case. He approached Thig warily, aware that disease often made a maniac of the finest members of the Horde. "No human being is more important than the Horde," he stated baldly. "This woman of whom you speak is merely one unit of the millions we must eliminate for the good of the Horde." Then it was that Thig went berserk. His fists slashed into the thick jaw of the scientist and his fingers ripped at the hard cords overlying the Orthan's vital throat tubes. His fingers and thumb gouged deep into Kam's startled throat and choked off any cry for assistance before it could be uttered. Kam's hand swept down to the holster swung from his intricate harness and dragged his blaster from it. Thig's other hand clamped over his and for long moments they swayed there, locked together in silent deadly struggle. The fate of a world hung in the balance as Kam's other hand fought against that lone arm of Thig. The scales swung in favor of Kam. Slowly the flaring snout of his weapon tilted upward until it reached the level of Thig's waist. Thig suddenly released his grip and dragged his enemy toward him. A sudden reversal of pressure on Kam's gun hand sent the weapon swivelling about full upon its owner's thick torso. Thig's fingers pressed down upon Kam's button finger, down upon the stud set into the grip of the decomposition blaster, and Kam's muscles turned to water. He shrieked. Before Thig's eyes half of his comrade's body sloughed away into foul corruption that swiftly gave way to hardened blobs of dessicated matter. Horror for what he had done—that he had slain one of his own Horde—made his limbs move woodenly. All of his thoughts were dulled for the moment. Painfully slow, he turned his body around toward the control blister, turned around on leaden feet, to look full into the narrowed icy eyes of his commander. He saw the heavy barrel of the blaster slashing down against his skull but he could not swing a fraction of an inch out of the way. His body seemed paralyzed. This was the end, he thought as he waited stupidly for the blow to fall, the end for Ellen and the kids and all the struggling races of Earth. He would never write another cowboy yarn—they would all be dead anyhow soon. Then a thunderclap exploded against his head and he dropped endlessly toward the deck. Blows rained against his skull. He wondered if Torp would ever cease to hammer at him and turn the deadly ray of the weapon upon him. Blood throbbed and pounded with every blow.... Bam, Bam, Bam, the blood pounded in his ears. Like repeated blows of a hammer they shook his booming head. No longer was Torp above him. He was in the corner of the laboratory, a crumpled blood-smeared heap of bruised flesh and bone. He was unfettered and the blood was caked upon his skull and in his matted hair. Torp must have thought he had killed him with those savage blows upon the head. Even Torp, thought Thig ruefully, gave way to the primitive rage of his ancestors at times; but to that very bit of unconscious atavism he now owed his life. A cool-headed robot of an Orthan would have efficiently used the blaster to destroy any possibility of remaining life in his unconscious body. Thig rolled slowly over so that his eye found the door into the control room. Torp would be coming back again to dispose of their bodies through the refuse lock. Already the body of Kam was gone. He wondered why he had been left until last. Perhaps Torp wished to take cultures of his blood and tissues to determine whether a disease was responsible for his sudden madness. The cases of fragile instruments were just above his head. Association of memories brought him the flash of the heavy blaster in its rack beneath them. His hand went up and felt the welcome hardness of the weapon. He tugged it free. In a moment he was on his knees crawling across the plates of the deck toward the door. Halfway across the floor he collapsed on his face, the metal of the gun making a harsh clang. He heard the feet of Torp scuffle out of silence and a choked cry in the man's throat squalled out into a senseless whinny. Thig raised himself up on a quivering elbow and slid the black length of the blaster in front of him. His eyes sought the doorway and stared full into the glaring vacant orbs of his commander. Torp leaned there watching him, his breath gurgling brokenly through his deep-bitten lips. The clawing marks of nails, fingernails, furrowed his face and chest. He was a madman! The deadly attack of Thig; his own violent avenging of Kam's death, and now the apparent return of the man he had killed come to life had all served to jolt his rigidly trained brain from its accustomed groove. The shock had been too much for the established thought-processes of the Orthan. So Thig shot him where he stood, mercifully, before that vacant mad stare set him, too, to gibbering and shrieking. Then he stepped over the skeleton-thing that had been Torp, using the new strength that victory had given him to drive him along. He had saved a world's civilization from extinction! The thought sobered him; yet, somehow, he was pleased that he had done so. After all, it had been the Earthwoman and the children he had been thinking of while he battled Kam, a selfish desire to protect them all. He went to the desk where Torp had been writing in the ship's log and read the last few nervously scrawled lines: Planet 72-P-3 unfit for colonization. Some pernicious disease that strikes at the brain centers and causes violent insanity is existent there. Thig, just returned from a survey of the planet, went mad and destroyed Kam. In turn I was forced to slay him. But it is not ended. Already I feel the insidious virus of.... And there his writing ended abruptly. Thig nodded. That would do it. He set the automatic pilot for the planet Ortha. Unless a rogue asteroid or a comet crossed the ship's path she would return safely to Ortha with that mute warning of danger on 72-P-3. The body of Torp would help to confirm his final message. Then Thig crossed the cabin to the auxiliary life boat there, one of a half-dozen space ships in miniature nested within the great ship's hull, and cut free from the mother vessel. He flipped the drive lever, felt the thrumming of the rockets driving him from the parent ship. The sensation of free flight against his new body was strangely exhilerating and heady. It was the newest of the emotions he had experienced on Earth since that day, so many months before, when he had felt the warmness of Ellen's lips tight against his. Thig flipped the drive lever, felt the thrumming of the rockets driving him from the parent ship. He swung about to the port, watched the flaming drive-rockets of the great exploratory ship hurl it toward far-away Ortha, and there was no regret in his mind that he was not returning to the planet of his first existence. He thought of the dull greys and blacks of his planet, of the monotonous routine of existence that had once been his—and his heart thrilled to the memories of the starry nights and perfect exciting days he had spent on his three month trip over Earth. He made a brief salute to the existence he had known, turned with a tiny sigh, and his fingers made brief adjustments in the controls. The rocket-thrum deepened, and the thin whistle of tenuous air clutching the ship echoed through the hull-plates. He thought of many things in those few moments. He watched the roundness of Earth flatten out, then take on the cup-like illusion that all planets had for an incoming ship. He reduced the drive of his rockets to a mere whisper, striving to control the impatience that crowded his mind. He shivered suddenly, remembering his utter callousness the first time he had sent a space ship whipping down toward the hills and valleys below. And there was a sickness within him when he fully realized that, despite his acquired memory and traits, he was an alien from outer space. He fingered the tiny scars that had completely obliterated the slight differences in his appearance from an Earthman's, and his fingers trembled a bit, as he bent and stared through the vision port. He said a brief prayer in his heart to a God whose presence he now felt very deeply. There were tears in the depths of his eyes, then, and memories were hot, bitter pains. Earth was not far below him. As he let gravity suck him earthward, he heaved a gasp of relief. He was no longer Thig, a creature of a Horde's creation, but Lewis Terry, writer of lurid gun-smoking tales of the West. He must remember that always. He had destroyed the real Terry and now, for the rest of his life, he must make up to the dead man's family. The knowledge that Ellen's love was not really meant for him would be a knife twisting in his heart but for her sake he must endure it. Her dreams and happiness must never be shattered. The bulge of Earth was flattening out now and he could see the outlines of Long Island in the growing twilight. A new plot was growing in the brain of Lewis Terry, a yarn about a cowboy suddenly transported to another world. He smiled ironically. He had seen those other worlds. Perhaps some day he would write about them.... He was Lewis Terry! He must remember that!

How do the ways of Ortha differ from those Thig discovers on Earth?

2

On Ortha, men are loyal to the Horde, and that is all they care about. They are cultured and brought to life in laboratories, so there are no fathers or mothers and no affection and love. From childhood on, males and females in Ortha are taught that the only important thing is the growth and power of the Horde. Men and women have no feelings outside of their devotion to the Horde. Men have no mates and children, which prevents Thig from first understanding the warm feeling that sweeps over him when Lewis Terry’s children greet him and Ellen kisses him on the first night he goes to their home. On Ortha, men have no independent ideas or interests; everything they think and do is to maintain the Horde. For this reason, their civilization has remained static for a hundred thousand years. On Earth, men and women love each other and marry and have children. Men are focused on the well-being of their families and their own lives rather than on the well-being of their population as a whole. Earthmen have independent thoughts and make their own decisions. People are unpredictable, and uncertainty adds interest to everyday life.

62198

QUEST OF THIG By BASIL WELLS Thig of Ortha was the vanguard of the conquering "HORDE." He had blasted across trackless space to subdue a defenseless world—only to meet on Earth emotions that were more deadly than weapons. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Thig carefully smoothed the dark sand and seaweed of the lonely beach over the metal lid of the flexible ringed tunnel that linked the grubby ship from another planet with the upper air. He looked out across the heaving waters of the Sound toward Connecticut. He stared appraisingly around at the luxuriant green growth of foliage further inland; and started toward the little stretch of trees and brush, walking carefully because of the lesser gravitation. Thig was shorter than the average Earthman—although on Ortha he was well above the average in height—but his body was thick and powerfully muscled. His skull was well-shaped and large; his features were regular, perhaps a trifle oversize, and his hair and eyes were a curiously matching blend of reddish brown. Oddest of all, he wore no garments, other than the necessary belt and straps to support his rod-like weapon of white metal and his pouches for food and specimens. The Orthan entered the narrow strip of trees and crossed to the little-used highway on the other side. Here he patiently sat down to wait for an Earthman or an Earthwoman to pass. His task now was to bring a native, intact if possible, back to the carefully buried space cruiser where his two fellows and himself would drain the creature's mentality of all its knowledge. In this way they could learn whether a planet was suited for colonization by later swarms of Orthans. Already they had charted over a hundred celestial bodies but of them all only three had proven worthy of consideration. This latest planet, however, 72-P-3 on the chart, appeared to be an ideal world in every respect. Sunlight, plenty of water and a dense atmospheric envelope made of 72-P-3 a paradise among planets. The explorer from another world crouched into the concealment of a leafy shrub. A creature was approaching. Its squat body was covered with baggy strips of bluish cloth and it carried a jointed rod of metal and wood in its paw. It walked upright as did the men of Ortha. Thig's cold eyes opened a trifle wider as he stared into the thing's stupid face. It was as though he was looking into a bit of polished metal at the reflection of himself! The Earthman was opposite now and he must waste no more precious time. The mighty muscles of the Orthan sent him hurtling across the intervening space in two prodigious bounds, and his hands clamped across the mouth and neck of the stranger.... Lewis Terry was going fishing. For a week the typewriter mill that had ground out a thousand assorted yarns of the untamed West and the frigid desolation of the Northwoods had been silent. Lewis wondered if he was going stale. He had sat every day for eight hours in front of that shiny-buttoned bane of the typist, but there were no results. Feebly he had punched a key two days ago and a $ sign had appeared. He hadn't dared touch the machine since. For Mr. Terry, that hard-hitting writer of two-gun action, had never been further west of Long Island than Elizabeth, and he had promised his wife, Ellen, that he would take the three children and herself on a trailer tour of the West that very summer. Since that promise, he could not write a word. Visions of whooping red-skinned Apaches and be-chapped outlaws raiding his little trailer home kept rolling up out of his subconscious. Yet he had to write at least three novelets and a fistful of short stories in the next two weeks to finance the great adventure—or the trip was off. So Lewis left the weathered old cottage in the early dawn and headed for his tubby old boat at the landing in an attempt to work out a salable yarn.... "Hey!" he shouted as a naked man sprang out of the bushes beside the road. "What's the trouble?" Then he had no time for further speech, the massive arms of the stranger had wound around him and two hamlike hands shut off his speech and his wind. He fought futilely against trained muscles. The hand clamping his throat relaxed for a moment and hacked along the side of his head. Blackness flooded the brain of Lewis, and he knew no more. "There it is," announced Thig, dropping the limp body of the captured Earthman to the metal deck-plates. "It is a male of the species that must have built the cities we saw as we landed." "He resembles Thig," announced Kam. "But for the strange covering he wears he might be Thig." "Thig will be this creature!" announced Torp. "With a psychic relay we will transfer the Earthman's memories and meager store of knowledge to the brain of Thig! He can then go out and scout this world without arousing suspicion. While he is gone, I will take Kam and explore the two inner planets." "You are the commander," said Thig. "But I wish this beast did not wear these clumsy sheathing upon his body. On Ortha we do not hamper the use of our limbs so." "Do not question the word of your commander," growled Torp, swelling out his thick chest menacingly. "It is for the good of our people that you disguise yourself as an Earthman." "For the good of the Horde," Thig intoned almost piously as he lifted Terry's body and headed for the laboratory. Service for the Horde was all that the men of Ortha knew. Carefully cultured and brought to life in the laboratories of their Horde, they knew neither father nor mother. Affection and love were entirely lacking in their early training and later life. They were trained antlike from childhood that only the growth and power of the Horde were of any moment. Men and women alike toiled and died like unfeeling robots of flesh and bone for the Horde. The Horde was their religion, their love-life, their everything! So it was that the bodies of the Earthman and the Orthan were strapped on two parallel tables of chill metal and the twin helmets, linked to one another by the intricacies of the psychic relay, put upon their heads. For ten hours or more the droning hum of the relay sucked Terry's brain dry of knowledge. The shock upon the nervous system of the Earthman proved too violent and his heart faltered after a time and stopped completely. Twice, with subtle drugs they restored pseudo-life to his body and kept the electrical impulses throbbing from his tortured brain, but after the third suspension of life Thig removed his helmet. "There is nothing more to learn," he informed his impassive comrades. "Now, let us get on with the plastic surgery that is required. My new body must return to its barbaric household before undue attention is aroused. And when I return I will take along some of the gleaming baubles we found on the red planet—these people value them highly." An hour later, his scars and altered cartilage already healed and painless, Thig again scraped sand over the entrance to the space ship and set out along the moonlit beach toward the nearest path running inland to his home. Memory was laying the country bare about him, Terry's own childhood memories of this particular section of Long Island. Here was the place where Jake and Ted had helped him dig for the buried treasure that old 'Notch-ear' Beggs had told them so exactly about. Remembrance of that episode gave Thig an idea about the little lump of jewels in his pocket. He had found them in a chest along the beach! He was coming up on the porch now and at the sound of his foot on the sagging boards the screen door burst open and three little Earth-creatures were hugging at his legs. An odd sensation, that his acquired memories labeled as pleasure, sent a warm glow upward from around his heart. Then he saw the slender red-haired shape of a woman, the mate of the dead man he knew, and confusion struck his well-trained brain. Men had no mates on Ortha, sex had been overthrown with all the other primitive impulses of barbarism; so he was incapable of understanding the emotions that swept through his acquired memory. Unsteadily he took her in his arms and felt her warm lips pressed, trembling, against his own. That same hot wave of pulsing blood choked achingly up into his throat. "Lew, dear," Ellen was asking, "where have you been all day? I called up at the landing but you were not there. I wanted to let you know that Saddlebag Publications sent a check for $50 for "Reversed Revolvers" and three other editors asked for shorts soon." "Shoulda got a hundred bucks for that yarn," grunted Thig, and gasped. For the moment he had been Lewis Terry and not Thig! So thoroughly had he acquired the knowledge of Terry that he found himself unconsciously adopting the thinking and mannerism of the other. All the better this way, he realized—more natural. "Sorry I was late," he said, digging into his pocket for the glittering baubles, "but I was poking around on the beach where we used to hunt treasure and I found an old chest. Inside it I found nothing but a handful of these." He flashed the jewels in front of Ellen's startled eyes and she clung, unbelieving, to his arm. "Why, Lew," she gasped, "they're worth a fortune! We can buy that new trailer now and have a rebuilt motor in the car. We can go west right away.... Hollywood, the Grand Canyon, cowboys!" "Uh huh," agreed the pseudo Lewis, memories of the ferocious savages and gunmen of his stories rendering him acutely unhappy. Sincerely he hoped that the west had reformed. "I saved some kraut and weiners," Ellen said. "Get washed up while I'm warming them up. Kids ate all the bread so I had to borrow some from the Eskoes. Want coffee, too?" "Mmmmmm," came from the depths of the chipped white wash-basin. "Home again," whispered Ellen as she stood beside Thig twelve weeks later and gazed tearfully at the weathered little gray house. She knelt beside the front stoop and reached for the key hidden beneath it. "The west was wonderful; tremendous, vast and beautiful," she went on as they climbed the steps, "but nowhere was there any place as beautiful as our own little strip of sky and water." Thig sank into a dusty old swing that hung on creaking chains from the exposed rafters of the porch roof. He looked down at the dusty gray car and the bulbous silvery bulk of the trailer that had been their living quarters for almost three months. Strange thoughts were afloat in the chaos of his cool Orthan brain. Tonight or tomorrow night at the latest he must contact his two fellows and report that Earth was a planetary paradise. No other world, including Ortha, was so well-favored and rich. An expeditionary force to wipe the grotesque civilizations of Earth out of existence would, of course, be necessary before the first units of new Hordes could be landed. And there Thig balked. Why must they destroy these people, imperfect though their civilization might be, to make room for the Hordes? Thig tried to tell himself that it was the transmitted thoughts of the dead Earthman that made him feel so, but he was not too sure. For three months he had lived with people who loved, hated, wept and sacrificed for reasons that he had never known existed. He had learned the heady glory of thinking for himself and making his own decisions. He had experienced the primitive joy of matching his wits and tongue against the wits of other unpredictable human beings. There was no abrupt division of men and women into definite classes of endeavor. A laborer thought the same thoughts that a governor might think. Uncertainty added zest to every day's life. The Orthan had come to question the sole devotion of the individual to the Horde to the exclusion of all other interests. What, he wondered, would one new world—or a hundred—populated by the Hordes add to the progress of humanity? For a hundred thousand years the Orthan civilization had remained static, its energies directed into certain well-defined channels. They were mindless bees maintaining their vast mechanical hives. There was that moment on the brink of the Grand Canyon when Ellen had caught his arm breathlessly at all the beauty spread away there beneath them. There were mornings in the desert when the sun painted in lurid red the peaks above the harsh black-and-whites of the sagebrush and cactus slopes. There was the little boy, his body burning with fever, who nestled trustingly against his tense man's body and slept—the son of Ellen and the man he had destroyed. Thig groaned. He was a weakling to let sentimentality so get the better of his judgment. He would go now to the space ship and urge them to blast off for Ortha. He sprang off the porch and strode away down the road toward the beach. The children ran to him; wanted to go along. He sent them away harshly but they smiled and waved their brown little hands. Ellen came to the door and called after him. "Hurry home, dear," she said. "I'll have a bite ready in about an hour." He dared not say anything, for his voice would have broken and she would have known something was wrong. She was a very wise sort of person when something was troubling him. He waved his stubby paw of a hand to show that he had heard, and blindly hurried toward the Sound. Oddly enough, as he hurried away along the narrow path through the autumn woods, his mind busied itself with a new epic of the west that lived no longer. He mentally titled it: "Rustlers' Riot" and blocked in the outlines of his plot. One section of his brain was that of the careless author of gunslinging yarns, a section that seemed to be sapping the life from his own brain. He knew that the story would never be written, but he toyed with the idea. So far had Thig the emotionless, robot-being from Ortha drifted from the unquestioning worship of the Horde! "You have done well," announced Torp when Thig had completed his report on the resources and temperatures of various sections of Terra. "We now have located three worlds fit for colonization and so we will return to Ortha at once. "I will recommend the conquest of this planet, 72-P-3 at once and the complete destruction of all biped life upon it. The mental aberrations of the barbaric natives might lead to endless complications if they were permitted to exist outside our ordered way of life. I imagine that three circuits of the planet about its primary should prove sufficient for the purposes of complete liquidation." "But why," asked Thig slowly, "could we not disarm all the natives and exile them on one of the less desirable continents, Antarctica for example or Siberia? They are primitive humans even as our race was once a race of primitives. It is not our duty to help to attain our own degree of knowledge and comfort?" "Only the good of the Horde matters!" shouted Torp angrily. "Shall a race of feeble-witted beasts, such as these Earthmen, stand in the way of a superior race? We want their world, and so we will take it. The Law of the Horde states that all the universe is ours for the taking." "Let us get back to Ortha at once, then," gritted out Thig savagely. "Never again do I wish to set foot upon the soil of this mad planet. There are forces at work upon Earth that we of Ortha have long forgotten." "Check the blood of Thig for disease, Kam," ordered Torp shortly. "His words are highly irrational. Some form of fever perhaps native to this world. While you examine him I will blast off for Ortha." Thig followed Kam into the tiny laboratory and found a seat beside the squat scientist's desk. His eyes roamed over the familiar instruments and gauges, each in its own precise position in the cases along the walls. His gaze lingered longest on the stubby black ugliness of a decomposition blaster in its rack close to the deck. A blast of the invisible radiations from that weapon's hot throat and flesh or vegetable fiber rotted into flaky ashes. The ship trembled beneath their feet; it tore free from the feeble clutch of the sand about it, and they were rocketing skyward. Thig's broad fingers bit deep into the unyielding metal of his chair. Suddenly he knew that he must go back to Earth, back to Ellen and the children of the man he had helped destroy. He loved Ellen, and nothing must stand between them! The Hordes of Ortha must find some other world, an empty world—this planet was not for them. "Turn back!" he cried wildly. "I must go back to Earth. There is a woman there, helpless and alone, who needs me! The Horde does not need this planet." Kam eyed him coldly and lifted a shining hypodermic syringe from its case. He approached Thig warily, aware that disease often made a maniac of the finest members of the Horde. "No human being is more important than the Horde," he stated baldly. "This woman of whom you speak is merely one unit of the millions we must eliminate for the good of the Horde." Then it was that Thig went berserk. His fists slashed into the thick jaw of the scientist and his fingers ripped at the hard cords overlying the Orthan's vital throat tubes. His fingers and thumb gouged deep into Kam's startled throat and choked off any cry for assistance before it could be uttered. Kam's hand swept down to the holster swung from his intricate harness and dragged his blaster from it. Thig's other hand clamped over his and for long moments they swayed there, locked together in silent deadly struggle. The fate of a world hung in the balance as Kam's other hand fought against that lone arm of Thig. The scales swung in favor of Kam. Slowly the flaring snout of his weapon tilted upward until it reached the level of Thig's waist. Thig suddenly released his grip and dragged his enemy toward him. A sudden reversal of pressure on Kam's gun hand sent the weapon swivelling about full upon its owner's thick torso. Thig's fingers pressed down upon Kam's button finger, down upon the stud set into the grip of the decomposition blaster, and Kam's muscles turned to water. He shrieked. Before Thig's eyes half of his comrade's body sloughed away into foul corruption that swiftly gave way to hardened blobs of dessicated matter. Horror for what he had done—that he had slain one of his own Horde—made his limbs move woodenly. All of his thoughts were dulled for the moment. Painfully slow, he turned his body around toward the control blister, turned around on leaden feet, to look full into the narrowed icy eyes of his commander. He saw the heavy barrel of the blaster slashing down against his skull but he could not swing a fraction of an inch out of the way. His body seemed paralyzed. This was the end, he thought as he waited stupidly for the blow to fall, the end for Ellen and the kids and all the struggling races of Earth. He would never write another cowboy yarn—they would all be dead anyhow soon. Then a thunderclap exploded against his head and he dropped endlessly toward the deck. Blows rained against his skull. He wondered if Torp would ever cease to hammer at him and turn the deadly ray of the weapon upon him. Blood throbbed and pounded with every blow.... Bam, Bam, Bam, the blood pounded in his ears. Like repeated blows of a hammer they shook his booming head. No longer was Torp above him. He was in the corner of the laboratory, a crumpled blood-smeared heap of bruised flesh and bone. He was unfettered and the blood was caked upon his skull and in his matted hair. Torp must have thought he had killed him with those savage blows upon the head. Even Torp, thought Thig ruefully, gave way to the primitive rage of his ancestors at times; but to that very bit of unconscious atavism he now owed his life. A cool-headed robot of an Orthan would have efficiently used the blaster to destroy any possibility of remaining life in his unconscious body. Thig rolled slowly over so that his eye found the door into the control room. Torp would be coming back again to dispose of their bodies through the refuse lock. Already the body of Kam was gone. He wondered why he had been left until last. Perhaps Torp wished to take cultures of his blood and tissues to determine whether a disease was responsible for his sudden madness. The cases of fragile instruments were just above his head. Association of memories brought him the flash of the heavy blaster in its rack beneath them. His hand went up and felt the welcome hardness of the weapon. He tugged it free. In a moment he was on his knees crawling across the plates of the deck toward the door. Halfway across the floor he collapsed on his face, the metal of the gun making a harsh clang. He heard the feet of Torp scuffle out of silence and a choked cry in the man's throat squalled out into a senseless whinny. Thig raised himself up on a quivering elbow and slid the black length of the blaster in front of him. His eyes sought the doorway and stared full into the glaring vacant orbs of his commander. Torp leaned there watching him, his breath gurgling brokenly through his deep-bitten lips. The clawing marks of nails, fingernails, furrowed his face and chest. He was a madman! The deadly attack of Thig; his own violent avenging of Kam's death, and now the apparent return of the man he had killed come to life had all served to jolt his rigidly trained brain from its accustomed groove. The shock had been too much for the established thought-processes of the Orthan. So Thig shot him where he stood, mercifully, before that vacant mad stare set him, too, to gibbering and shrieking. Then he stepped over the skeleton-thing that had been Torp, using the new strength that victory had given him to drive him along. He had saved a world's civilization from extinction! The thought sobered him; yet, somehow, he was pleased that he had done so. After all, it had been the Earthwoman and the children he had been thinking of while he battled Kam, a selfish desire to protect them all. He went to the desk where Torp had been writing in the ship's log and read the last few nervously scrawled lines: Planet 72-P-3 unfit for colonization. Some pernicious disease that strikes at the brain centers and causes violent insanity is existent there. Thig, just returned from a survey of the planet, went mad and destroyed Kam. In turn I was forced to slay him. But it is not ended. Already I feel the insidious virus of.... And there his writing ended abruptly. Thig nodded. That would do it. He set the automatic pilot for the planet Ortha. Unless a rogue asteroid or a comet crossed the ship's path she would return safely to Ortha with that mute warning of danger on 72-P-3. The body of Torp would help to confirm his final message. Then Thig crossed the cabin to the auxiliary life boat there, one of a half-dozen space ships in miniature nested within the great ship's hull, and cut free from the mother vessel. He flipped the drive lever, felt the thrumming of the rockets driving him from the parent ship. The sensation of free flight against his new body was strangely exhilerating and heady. It was the newest of the emotions he had experienced on Earth since that day, so many months before, when he had felt the warmness of Ellen's lips tight against his. Thig flipped the drive lever, felt the thrumming of the rockets driving him from the parent ship. He swung about to the port, watched the flaming drive-rockets of the great exploratory ship hurl it toward far-away Ortha, and there was no regret in his mind that he was not returning to the planet of his first existence. He thought of the dull greys and blacks of his planet, of the monotonous routine of existence that had once been his—and his heart thrilled to the memories of the starry nights and perfect exciting days he had spent on his three month trip over Earth. He made a brief salute to the existence he had known, turned with a tiny sigh, and his fingers made brief adjustments in the controls. The rocket-thrum deepened, and the thin whistle of tenuous air clutching the ship echoed through the hull-plates. He thought of many things in those few moments. He watched the roundness of Earth flatten out, then take on the cup-like illusion that all planets had for an incoming ship. He reduced the drive of his rockets to a mere whisper, striving to control the impatience that crowded his mind. He shivered suddenly, remembering his utter callousness the first time he had sent a space ship whipping down toward the hills and valleys below. And there was a sickness within him when he fully realized that, despite his acquired memory and traits, he was an alien from outer space. He fingered the tiny scars that had completely obliterated the slight differences in his appearance from an Earthman's, and his fingers trembled a bit, as he bent and stared through the vision port. He said a brief prayer in his heart to a God whose presence he now felt very deeply. There were tears in the depths of his eyes, then, and memories were hot, bitter pains. Earth was not far below him. As he let gravity suck him earthward, he heaved a gasp of relief. He was no longer Thig, a creature of a Horde's creation, but Lewis Terry, writer of lurid gun-smoking tales of the West. He must remember that always. He had destroyed the real Terry and now, for the rest of his life, he must make up to the dead man's family. The knowledge that Ellen's love was not really meant for him would be a knife twisting in his heart but for her sake he must endure it. Her dreams and happiness must never be shattered. The bulge of Earth was flattening out now and he could see the outlines of Long Island in the growing twilight. A new plot was growing in the brain of Lewis Terry, a yarn about a cowboy suddenly transported to another world. He smiled ironically. He had seen those other worlds. Perhaps some day he would write about them.... He was Lewis Terry! He must remember that!

Who is Ellen and how does she affect Thig and his choices?

9

Ellen is the wife of Lewis Terry, and she is described as slender with red hair. When Thig assumes Terry’s identity, some of the first sensations he experiences result from Ellen kissing him. On their travels throughout the American West, Thig bonds with her and with her children. He learns to understand new experiences and emotions throughout his time with Ellen, and he observes that she seems to know how he’s feeling without him telling her. When Thig ultimately realizes that he wants to go back to Earth, it is because he loves Ellen and wants to save her and humanity. It is Ellen he thinks about as he returns to Earth and feels the sting of regret that he killed her husband, and decides to spend the rest of her life making it up to her.

62198

QUEST OF THIG By BASIL WELLS Thig of Ortha was the vanguard of the conquering "HORDE." He had blasted across trackless space to subdue a defenseless world—only to meet on Earth emotions that were more deadly than weapons. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Thig carefully smoothed the dark sand and seaweed of the lonely beach over the metal lid of the flexible ringed tunnel that linked the grubby ship from another planet with the upper air. He looked out across the heaving waters of the Sound toward Connecticut. He stared appraisingly around at the luxuriant green growth of foliage further inland; and started toward the little stretch of trees and brush, walking carefully because of the lesser gravitation. Thig was shorter than the average Earthman—although on Ortha he was well above the average in height—but his body was thick and powerfully muscled. His skull was well-shaped and large; his features were regular, perhaps a trifle oversize, and his hair and eyes were a curiously matching blend of reddish brown. Oddest of all, he wore no garments, other than the necessary belt and straps to support his rod-like weapon of white metal and his pouches for food and specimens. The Orthan entered the narrow strip of trees and crossed to the little-used highway on the other side. Here he patiently sat down to wait for an Earthman or an Earthwoman to pass. His task now was to bring a native, intact if possible, back to the carefully buried space cruiser where his two fellows and himself would drain the creature's mentality of all its knowledge. In this way they could learn whether a planet was suited for colonization by later swarms of Orthans. Already they had charted over a hundred celestial bodies but of them all only three had proven worthy of consideration. This latest planet, however, 72-P-3 on the chart, appeared to be an ideal world in every respect. Sunlight, plenty of water and a dense atmospheric envelope made of 72-P-3 a paradise among planets. The explorer from another world crouched into the concealment of a leafy shrub. A creature was approaching. Its squat body was covered with baggy strips of bluish cloth and it carried a jointed rod of metal and wood in its paw. It walked upright as did the men of Ortha. Thig's cold eyes opened a trifle wider as he stared into the thing's stupid face. It was as though he was looking into a bit of polished metal at the reflection of himself! The Earthman was opposite now and he must waste no more precious time. The mighty muscles of the Orthan sent him hurtling across the intervening space in two prodigious bounds, and his hands clamped across the mouth and neck of the stranger.... Lewis Terry was going fishing. For a week the typewriter mill that had ground out a thousand assorted yarns of the untamed West and the frigid desolation of the Northwoods had been silent. Lewis wondered if he was going stale. He had sat every day for eight hours in front of that shiny-buttoned bane of the typist, but there were no results. Feebly he had punched a key two days ago and a $ sign had appeared. He hadn't dared touch the machine since. For Mr. Terry, that hard-hitting writer of two-gun action, had never been further west of Long Island than Elizabeth, and he had promised his wife, Ellen, that he would take the three children and herself on a trailer tour of the West that very summer. Since that promise, he could not write a word. Visions of whooping red-skinned Apaches and be-chapped outlaws raiding his little trailer home kept rolling up out of his subconscious. Yet he had to write at least three novelets and a fistful of short stories in the next two weeks to finance the great adventure—or the trip was off. So Lewis left the weathered old cottage in the early dawn and headed for his tubby old boat at the landing in an attempt to work out a salable yarn.... "Hey!" he shouted as a naked man sprang out of the bushes beside the road. "What's the trouble?" Then he had no time for further speech, the massive arms of the stranger had wound around him and two hamlike hands shut off his speech and his wind. He fought futilely against trained muscles. The hand clamping his throat relaxed for a moment and hacked along the side of his head. Blackness flooded the brain of Lewis, and he knew no more. "There it is," announced Thig, dropping the limp body of the captured Earthman to the metal deck-plates. "It is a male of the species that must have built the cities we saw as we landed." "He resembles Thig," announced Kam. "But for the strange covering he wears he might be Thig." "Thig will be this creature!" announced Torp. "With a psychic relay we will transfer the Earthman's memories and meager store of knowledge to the brain of Thig! He can then go out and scout this world without arousing suspicion. While he is gone, I will take Kam and explore the two inner planets." "You are the commander," said Thig. "But I wish this beast did not wear these clumsy sheathing upon his body. On Ortha we do not hamper the use of our limbs so." "Do not question the word of your commander," growled Torp, swelling out his thick chest menacingly. "It is for the good of our people that you disguise yourself as an Earthman." "For the good of the Horde," Thig intoned almost piously as he lifted Terry's body and headed for the laboratory. Service for the Horde was all that the men of Ortha knew. Carefully cultured and brought to life in the laboratories of their Horde, they knew neither father nor mother. Affection and love were entirely lacking in their early training and later life. They were trained antlike from childhood that only the growth and power of the Horde were of any moment. Men and women alike toiled and died like unfeeling robots of flesh and bone for the Horde. The Horde was their religion, their love-life, their everything! So it was that the bodies of the Earthman and the Orthan were strapped on two parallel tables of chill metal and the twin helmets, linked to one another by the intricacies of the psychic relay, put upon their heads. For ten hours or more the droning hum of the relay sucked Terry's brain dry of knowledge. The shock upon the nervous system of the Earthman proved too violent and his heart faltered after a time and stopped completely. Twice, with subtle drugs they restored pseudo-life to his body and kept the electrical impulses throbbing from his tortured brain, but after the third suspension of life Thig removed his helmet. "There is nothing more to learn," he informed his impassive comrades. "Now, let us get on with the plastic surgery that is required. My new body must return to its barbaric household before undue attention is aroused. And when I return I will take along some of the gleaming baubles we found on the red planet—these people value them highly." An hour later, his scars and altered cartilage already healed and painless, Thig again scraped sand over the entrance to the space ship and set out along the moonlit beach toward the nearest path running inland to his home. Memory was laying the country bare about him, Terry's own childhood memories of this particular section of Long Island. Here was the place where Jake and Ted had helped him dig for the buried treasure that old 'Notch-ear' Beggs had told them so exactly about. Remembrance of that episode gave Thig an idea about the little lump of jewels in his pocket. He had found them in a chest along the beach! He was coming up on the porch now and at the sound of his foot on the sagging boards the screen door burst open and three little Earth-creatures were hugging at his legs. An odd sensation, that his acquired memories labeled as pleasure, sent a warm glow upward from around his heart. Then he saw the slender red-haired shape of a woman, the mate of the dead man he knew, and confusion struck his well-trained brain. Men had no mates on Ortha, sex had been overthrown with all the other primitive impulses of barbarism; so he was incapable of understanding the emotions that swept through his acquired memory. Unsteadily he took her in his arms and felt her warm lips pressed, trembling, against his own. That same hot wave of pulsing blood choked achingly up into his throat. "Lew, dear," Ellen was asking, "where have you been all day? I called up at the landing but you were not there. I wanted to let you know that Saddlebag Publications sent a check for $50 for "Reversed Revolvers" and three other editors asked for shorts soon." "Shoulda got a hundred bucks for that yarn," grunted Thig, and gasped. For the moment he had been Lewis Terry and not Thig! So thoroughly had he acquired the knowledge of Terry that he found himself unconsciously adopting the thinking and mannerism of the other. All the better this way, he realized—more natural. "Sorry I was late," he said, digging into his pocket for the glittering baubles, "but I was poking around on the beach where we used to hunt treasure and I found an old chest. Inside it I found nothing but a handful of these." He flashed the jewels in front of Ellen's startled eyes and she clung, unbelieving, to his arm. "Why, Lew," she gasped, "they're worth a fortune! We can buy that new trailer now and have a rebuilt motor in the car. We can go west right away.... Hollywood, the Grand Canyon, cowboys!" "Uh huh," agreed the pseudo Lewis, memories of the ferocious savages and gunmen of his stories rendering him acutely unhappy. Sincerely he hoped that the west had reformed. "I saved some kraut and weiners," Ellen said. "Get washed up while I'm warming them up. Kids ate all the bread so I had to borrow some from the Eskoes. Want coffee, too?" "Mmmmmm," came from the depths of the chipped white wash-basin. "Home again," whispered Ellen as she stood beside Thig twelve weeks later and gazed tearfully at the weathered little gray house. She knelt beside the front stoop and reached for the key hidden beneath it. "The west was wonderful; tremendous, vast and beautiful," she went on as they climbed the steps, "but nowhere was there any place as beautiful as our own little strip of sky and water." Thig sank into a dusty old swing that hung on creaking chains from the exposed rafters of the porch roof. He looked down at the dusty gray car and the bulbous silvery bulk of the trailer that had been their living quarters for almost three months. Strange thoughts were afloat in the chaos of his cool Orthan brain. Tonight or tomorrow night at the latest he must contact his two fellows and report that Earth was a planetary paradise. No other world, including Ortha, was so well-favored and rich. An expeditionary force to wipe the grotesque civilizations of Earth out of existence would, of course, be necessary before the first units of new Hordes could be landed. And there Thig balked. Why must they destroy these people, imperfect though their civilization might be, to make room for the Hordes? Thig tried to tell himself that it was the transmitted thoughts of the dead Earthman that made him feel so, but he was not too sure. For three months he had lived with people who loved, hated, wept and sacrificed for reasons that he had never known existed. He had learned the heady glory of thinking for himself and making his own decisions. He had experienced the primitive joy of matching his wits and tongue against the wits of other unpredictable human beings. There was no abrupt division of men and women into definite classes of endeavor. A laborer thought the same thoughts that a governor might think. Uncertainty added zest to every day's life. The Orthan had come to question the sole devotion of the individual to the Horde to the exclusion of all other interests. What, he wondered, would one new world—or a hundred—populated by the Hordes add to the progress of humanity? For a hundred thousand years the Orthan civilization had remained static, its energies directed into certain well-defined channels. They were mindless bees maintaining their vast mechanical hives. There was that moment on the brink of the Grand Canyon when Ellen had caught his arm breathlessly at all the beauty spread away there beneath them. There were mornings in the desert when the sun painted in lurid red the peaks above the harsh black-and-whites of the sagebrush and cactus slopes. There was the little boy, his body burning with fever, who nestled trustingly against his tense man's body and slept—the son of Ellen and the man he had destroyed. Thig groaned. He was a weakling to let sentimentality so get the better of his judgment. He would go now to the space ship and urge them to blast off for Ortha. He sprang off the porch and strode away down the road toward the beach. The children ran to him; wanted to go along. He sent them away harshly but they smiled and waved their brown little hands. Ellen came to the door and called after him. "Hurry home, dear," she said. "I'll have a bite ready in about an hour." He dared not say anything, for his voice would have broken and she would have known something was wrong. She was a very wise sort of person when something was troubling him. He waved his stubby paw of a hand to show that he had heard, and blindly hurried toward the Sound. Oddly enough, as he hurried away along the narrow path through the autumn woods, his mind busied itself with a new epic of the west that lived no longer. He mentally titled it: "Rustlers' Riot" and blocked in the outlines of his plot. One section of his brain was that of the careless author of gunslinging yarns, a section that seemed to be sapping the life from his own brain. He knew that the story would never be written, but he toyed with the idea. So far had Thig the emotionless, robot-being from Ortha drifted from the unquestioning worship of the Horde! "You have done well," announced Torp when Thig had completed his report on the resources and temperatures of various sections of Terra. "We now have located three worlds fit for colonization and so we will return to Ortha at once. "I will recommend the conquest of this planet, 72-P-3 at once and the complete destruction of all biped life upon it. The mental aberrations of the barbaric natives might lead to endless complications if they were permitted to exist outside our ordered way of life. I imagine that three circuits of the planet about its primary should prove sufficient for the purposes of complete liquidation." "But why," asked Thig slowly, "could we not disarm all the natives and exile them on one of the less desirable continents, Antarctica for example or Siberia? They are primitive humans even as our race was once a race of primitives. It is not our duty to help to attain our own degree of knowledge and comfort?" "Only the good of the Horde matters!" shouted Torp angrily. "Shall a race of feeble-witted beasts, such as these Earthmen, stand in the way of a superior race? We want their world, and so we will take it. The Law of the Horde states that all the universe is ours for the taking." "Let us get back to Ortha at once, then," gritted out Thig savagely. "Never again do I wish to set foot upon the soil of this mad planet. There are forces at work upon Earth that we of Ortha have long forgotten." "Check the blood of Thig for disease, Kam," ordered Torp shortly. "His words are highly irrational. Some form of fever perhaps native to this world. While you examine him I will blast off for Ortha." Thig followed Kam into the tiny laboratory and found a seat beside the squat scientist's desk. His eyes roamed over the familiar instruments and gauges, each in its own precise position in the cases along the walls. His gaze lingered longest on the stubby black ugliness of a decomposition blaster in its rack close to the deck. A blast of the invisible radiations from that weapon's hot throat and flesh or vegetable fiber rotted into flaky ashes. The ship trembled beneath their feet; it tore free from the feeble clutch of the sand about it, and they were rocketing skyward. Thig's broad fingers bit deep into the unyielding metal of his chair. Suddenly he knew that he must go back to Earth, back to Ellen and the children of the man he had helped destroy. He loved Ellen, and nothing must stand between them! The Hordes of Ortha must find some other world, an empty world—this planet was not for them. "Turn back!" he cried wildly. "I must go back to Earth. There is a woman there, helpless and alone, who needs me! The Horde does not need this planet." Kam eyed him coldly and lifted a shining hypodermic syringe from its case. He approached Thig warily, aware that disease often made a maniac of the finest members of the Horde. "No human being is more important than the Horde," he stated baldly. "This woman of whom you speak is merely one unit of the millions we must eliminate for the good of the Horde." Then it was that Thig went berserk. His fists slashed into the thick jaw of the scientist and his fingers ripped at the hard cords overlying the Orthan's vital throat tubes. His fingers and thumb gouged deep into Kam's startled throat and choked off any cry for assistance before it could be uttered. Kam's hand swept down to the holster swung from his intricate harness and dragged his blaster from it. Thig's other hand clamped over his and for long moments they swayed there, locked together in silent deadly struggle. The fate of a world hung in the balance as Kam's other hand fought against that lone arm of Thig. The scales swung in favor of Kam. Slowly the flaring snout of his weapon tilted upward until it reached the level of Thig's waist. Thig suddenly released his grip and dragged his enemy toward him. A sudden reversal of pressure on Kam's gun hand sent the weapon swivelling about full upon its owner's thick torso. Thig's fingers pressed down upon Kam's button finger, down upon the stud set into the grip of the decomposition blaster, and Kam's muscles turned to water. He shrieked. Before Thig's eyes half of his comrade's body sloughed away into foul corruption that swiftly gave way to hardened blobs of dessicated matter. Horror for what he had done—that he had slain one of his own Horde—made his limbs move woodenly. All of his thoughts were dulled for the moment. Painfully slow, he turned his body around toward the control blister, turned around on leaden feet, to look full into the narrowed icy eyes of his commander. He saw the heavy barrel of the blaster slashing down against his skull but he could not swing a fraction of an inch out of the way. His body seemed paralyzed. This was the end, he thought as he waited stupidly for the blow to fall, the end for Ellen and the kids and all the struggling races of Earth. He would never write another cowboy yarn—they would all be dead anyhow soon. Then a thunderclap exploded against his head and he dropped endlessly toward the deck. Blows rained against his skull. He wondered if Torp would ever cease to hammer at him and turn the deadly ray of the weapon upon him. Blood throbbed and pounded with every blow.... Bam, Bam, Bam, the blood pounded in his ears. Like repeated blows of a hammer they shook his booming head. No longer was Torp above him. He was in the corner of the laboratory, a crumpled blood-smeared heap of bruised flesh and bone. He was unfettered and the blood was caked upon his skull and in his matted hair. Torp must have thought he had killed him with those savage blows upon the head. Even Torp, thought Thig ruefully, gave way to the primitive rage of his ancestors at times; but to that very bit of unconscious atavism he now owed his life. A cool-headed robot of an Orthan would have efficiently used the blaster to destroy any possibility of remaining life in his unconscious body. Thig rolled slowly over so that his eye found the door into the control room. Torp would be coming back again to dispose of their bodies through the refuse lock. Already the body of Kam was gone. He wondered why he had been left until last. Perhaps Torp wished to take cultures of his blood and tissues to determine whether a disease was responsible for his sudden madness. The cases of fragile instruments were just above his head. Association of memories brought him the flash of the heavy blaster in its rack beneath them. His hand went up and felt the welcome hardness of the weapon. He tugged it free. In a moment he was on his knees crawling across the plates of the deck toward the door. Halfway across the floor he collapsed on his face, the metal of the gun making a harsh clang. He heard the feet of Torp scuffle out of silence and a choked cry in the man's throat squalled out into a senseless whinny. Thig raised himself up on a quivering elbow and slid the black length of the blaster in front of him. His eyes sought the doorway and stared full into the glaring vacant orbs of his commander. Torp leaned there watching him, his breath gurgling brokenly through his deep-bitten lips. The clawing marks of nails, fingernails, furrowed his face and chest. He was a madman! The deadly attack of Thig; his own violent avenging of Kam's death, and now the apparent return of the man he had killed come to life had all served to jolt his rigidly trained brain from its accustomed groove. The shock had been too much for the established thought-processes of the Orthan. So Thig shot him where he stood, mercifully, before that vacant mad stare set him, too, to gibbering and shrieking. Then he stepped over the skeleton-thing that had been Torp, using the new strength that victory had given him to drive him along. He had saved a world's civilization from extinction! The thought sobered him; yet, somehow, he was pleased that he had done so. After all, it had been the Earthwoman and the children he had been thinking of while he battled Kam, a selfish desire to protect them all. He went to the desk where Torp had been writing in the ship's log and read the last few nervously scrawled lines: Planet 72-P-3 unfit for colonization. Some pernicious disease that strikes at the brain centers and causes violent insanity is existent there. Thig, just returned from a survey of the planet, went mad and destroyed Kam. In turn I was forced to slay him. But it is not ended. Already I feel the insidious virus of.... And there his writing ended abruptly. Thig nodded. That would do it. He set the automatic pilot for the planet Ortha. Unless a rogue asteroid or a comet crossed the ship's path she would return safely to Ortha with that mute warning of danger on 72-P-3. The body of Torp would help to confirm his final message. Then Thig crossed the cabin to the auxiliary life boat there, one of a half-dozen space ships in miniature nested within the great ship's hull, and cut free from the mother vessel. He flipped the drive lever, felt the thrumming of the rockets driving him from the parent ship. The sensation of free flight against his new body was strangely exhilerating and heady. It was the newest of the emotions he had experienced on Earth since that day, so many months before, when he had felt the warmness of Ellen's lips tight against his. Thig flipped the drive lever, felt the thrumming of the rockets driving him from the parent ship. He swung about to the port, watched the flaming drive-rockets of the great exploratory ship hurl it toward far-away Ortha, and there was no regret in his mind that he was not returning to the planet of his first existence. He thought of the dull greys and blacks of his planet, of the monotonous routine of existence that had once been his—and his heart thrilled to the memories of the starry nights and perfect exciting days he had spent on his three month trip over Earth. He made a brief salute to the existence he had known, turned with a tiny sigh, and his fingers made brief adjustments in the controls. The rocket-thrum deepened, and the thin whistle of tenuous air clutching the ship echoed through the hull-plates. He thought of many things in those few moments. He watched the roundness of Earth flatten out, then take on the cup-like illusion that all planets had for an incoming ship. He reduced the drive of his rockets to a mere whisper, striving to control the impatience that crowded his mind. He shivered suddenly, remembering his utter callousness the first time he had sent a space ship whipping down toward the hills and valleys below. And there was a sickness within him when he fully realized that, despite his acquired memory and traits, he was an alien from outer space. He fingered the tiny scars that had completely obliterated the slight differences in his appearance from an Earthman's, and his fingers trembled a bit, as he bent and stared through the vision port. He said a brief prayer in his heart to a God whose presence he now felt very deeply. There were tears in the depths of his eyes, then, and memories were hot, bitter pains. Earth was not far below him. As he let gravity suck him earthward, he heaved a gasp of relief. He was no longer Thig, a creature of a Horde's creation, but Lewis Terry, writer of lurid gun-smoking tales of the West. He must remember that always. He had destroyed the real Terry and now, for the rest of his life, he must make up to the dead man's family. The knowledge that Ellen's love was not really meant for him would be a knife twisting in his heart but for her sake he must endure it. Her dreams and happiness must never be shattered. The bulge of Earth was flattening out now and he could see the outlines of Long Island in the growing twilight. A new plot was growing in the brain of Lewis Terry, a yarn about a cowboy suddenly transported to another world. He smiled ironically. He had seen those other worlds. Perhaps some day he would write about them.... He was Lewis Terry! He must remember that!

Who is Ellen and how does she affect Thig and his choices?

8

Ellen is Lewis Terry’s wife, whom Thig meets after receiving Lew’s memories, thoughts, and emotions. From the moment he feels Ellen’s embrace and her kiss, he experiences emotions he has never felt before. He travels with her and the children out West, where she demonstrates the feeling of breathless wonder at the beauty of nature when they visit the Grand Canyon. He feels love for Ellen, and that feeling changes everything Thig thought he knew. When he returns to the ship after spending three months with Ellen, he feels the strong urge to return to her and spend the rest of his life with her. He abandons the call of the Horde and completely rejects his old way of living. He would rather spend his life feeling things that are new and with purpose as opposed to the pointless conquering of his old life.

62198

QUEST OF THIG By BASIL WELLS Thig of Ortha was the vanguard of the conquering "HORDE." He had blasted across trackless space to subdue a defenseless world—only to meet on Earth emotions that were more deadly than weapons. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Thig carefully smoothed the dark sand and seaweed of the lonely beach over the metal lid of the flexible ringed tunnel that linked the grubby ship from another planet with the upper air. He looked out across the heaving waters of the Sound toward Connecticut. He stared appraisingly around at the luxuriant green growth of foliage further inland; and started toward the little stretch of trees and brush, walking carefully because of the lesser gravitation. Thig was shorter than the average Earthman—although on Ortha he was well above the average in height—but his body was thick and powerfully muscled. His skull was well-shaped and large; his features were regular, perhaps a trifle oversize, and his hair and eyes were a curiously matching blend of reddish brown. Oddest of all, he wore no garments, other than the necessary belt and straps to support his rod-like weapon of white metal and his pouches for food and specimens. The Orthan entered the narrow strip of trees and crossed to the little-used highway on the other side. Here he patiently sat down to wait for an Earthman or an Earthwoman to pass. His task now was to bring a native, intact if possible, back to the carefully buried space cruiser where his two fellows and himself would drain the creature's mentality of all its knowledge. In this way they could learn whether a planet was suited for colonization by later swarms of Orthans. Already they had charted over a hundred celestial bodies but of them all only three had proven worthy of consideration. This latest planet, however, 72-P-3 on the chart, appeared to be an ideal world in every respect. Sunlight, plenty of water and a dense atmospheric envelope made of 72-P-3 a paradise among planets. The explorer from another world crouched into the concealment of a leafy shrub. A creature was approaching. Its squat body was covered with baggy strips of bluish cloth and it carried a jointed rod of metal and wood in its paw. It walked upright as did the men of Ortha. Thig's cold eyes opened a trifle wider as he stared into the thing's stupid face. It was as though he was looking into a bit of polished metal at the reflection of himself! The Earthman was opposite now and he must waste no more precious time. The mighty muscles of the Orthan sent him hurtling across the intervening space in two prodigious bounds, and his hands clamped across the mouth and neck of the stranger.... Lewis Terry was going fishing. For a week the typewriter mill that had ground out a thousand assorted yarns of the untamed West and the frigid desolation of the Northwoods had been silent. Lewis wondered if he was going stale. He had sat every day for eight hours in front of that shiny-buttoned bane of the typist, but there were no results. Feebly he had punched a key two days ago and a $ sign had appeared. He hadn't dared touch the machine since. For Mr. Terry, that hard-hitting writer of two-gun action, had never been further west of Long Island than Elizabeth, and he had promised his wife, Ellen, that he would take the three children and herself on a trailer tour of the West that very summer. Since that promise, he could not write a word. Visions of whooping red-skinned Apaches and be-chapped outlaws raiding his little trailer home kept rolling up out of his subconscious. Yet he had to write at least three novelets and a fistful of short stories in the next two weeks to finance the great adventure—or the trip was off. So Lewis left the weathered old cottage in the early dawn and headed for his tubby old boat at the landing in an attempt to work out a salable yarn.... "Hey!" he shouted as a naked man sprang out of the bushes beside the road. "What's the trouble?" Then he had no time for further speech, the massive arms of the stranger had wound around him and two hamlike hands shut off his speech and his wind. He fought futilely against trained muscles. The hand clamping his throat relaxed for a moment and hacked along the side of his head. Blackness flooded the brain of Lewis, and he knew no more. "There it is," announced Thig, dropping the limp body of the captured Earthman to the metal deck-plates. "It is a male of the species that must have built the cities we saw as we landed." "He resembles Thig," announced Kam. "But for the strange covering he wears he might be Thig." "Thig will be this creature!" announced Torp. "With a psychic relay we will transfer the Earthman's memories and meager store of knowledge to the brain of Thig! He can then go out and scout this world without arousing suspicion. While he is gone, I will take Kam and explore the two inner planets." "You are the commander," said Thig. "But I wish this beast did not wear these clumsy sheathing upon his body. On Ortha we do not hamper the use of our limbs so." "Do not question the word of your commander," growled Torp, swelling out his thick chest menacingly. "It is for the good of our people that you disguise yourself as an Earthman." "For the good of the Horde," Thig intoned almost piously as he lifted Terry's body and headed for the laboratory. Service for the Horde was all that the men of Ortha knew. Carefully cultured and brought to life in the laboratories of their Horde, they knew neither father nor mother. Affection and love were entirely lacking in their early training and later life. They were trained antlike from childhood that only the growth and power of the Horde were of any moment. Men and women alike toiled and died like unfeeling robots of flesh and bone for the Horde. The Horde was their religion, their love-life, their everything! So it was that the bodies of the Earthman and the Orthan were strapped on two parallel tables of chill metal and the twin helmets, linked to one another by the intricacies of the psychic relay, put upon their heads. For ten hours or more the droning hum of the relay sucked Terry's brain dry of knowledge. The shock upon the nervous system of the Earthman proved too violent and his heart faltered after a time and stopped completely. Twice, with subtle drugs they restored pseudo-life to his body and kept the electrical impulses throbbing from his tortured brain, but after the third suspension of life Thig removed his helmet. "There is nothing more to learn," he informed his impassive comrades. "Now, let us get on with the plastic surgery that is required. My new body must return to its barbaric household before undue attention is aroused. And when I return I will take along some of the gleaming baubles we found on the red planet—these people value them highly." An hour later, his scars and altered cartilage already healed and painless, Thig again scraped sand over the entrance to the space ship and set out along the moonlit beach toward the nearest path running inland to his home. Memory was laying the country bare about him, Terry's own childhood memories of this particular section of Long Island. Here was the place where Jake and Ted had helped him dig for the buried treasure that old 'Notch-ear' Beggs had told them so exactly about. Remembrance of that episode gave Thig an idea about the little lump of jewels in his pocket. He had found them in a chest along the beach! He was coming up on the porch now and at the sound of his foot on the sagging boards the screen door burst open and three little Earth-creatures were hugging at his legs. An odd sensation, that his acquired memories labeled as pleasure, sent a warm glow upward from around his heart. Then he saw the slender red-haired shape of a woman, the mate of the dead man he knew, and confusion struck his well-trained brain. Men had no mates on Ortha, sex had been overthrown with all the other primitive impulses of barbarism; so he was incapable of understanding the emotions that swept through his acquired memory. Unsteadily he took her in his arms and felt her warm lips pressed, trembling, against his own. That same hot wave of pulsing blood choked achingly up into his throat. "Lew, dear," Ellen was asking, "where have you been all day? I called up at the landing but you were not there. I wanted to let you know that Saddlebag Publications sent a check for $50 for "Reversed Revolvers" and three other editors asked for shorts soon." "Shoulda got a hundred bucks for that yarn," grunted Thig, and gasped. For the moment he had been Lewis Terry and not Thig! So thoroughly had he acquired the knowledge of Terry that he found himself unconsciously adopting the thinking and mannerism of the other. All the better this way, he realized—more natural. "Sorry I was late," he said, digging into his pocket for the glittering baubles, "but I was poking around on the beach where we used to hunt treasure and I found an old chest. Inside it I found nothing but a handful of these." He flashed the jewels in front of Ellen's startled eyes and she clung, unbelieving, to his arm. "Why, Lew," she gasped, "they're worth a fortune! We can buy that new trailer now and have a rebuilt motor in the car. We can go west right away.... Hollywood, the Grand Canyon, cowboys!" "Uh huh," agreed the pseudo Lewis, memories of the ferocious savages and gunmen of his stories rendering him acutely unhappy. Sincerely he hoped that the west had reformed. "I saved some kraut and weiners," Ellen said. "Get washed up while I'm warming them up. Kids ate all the bread so I had to borrow some from the Eskoes. Want coffee, too?" "Mmmmmm," came from the depths of the chipped white wash-basin. "Home again," whispered Ellen as she stood beside Thig twelve weeks later and gazed tearfully at the weathered little gray house. She knelt beside the front stoop and reached for the key hidden beneath it. "The west was wonderful; tremendous, vast and beautiful," she went on as they climbed the steps, "but nowhere was there any place as beautiful as our own little strip of sky and water." Thig sank into a dusty old swing that hung on creaking chains from the exposed rafters of the porch roof. He looked down at the dusty gray car and the bulbous silvery bulk of the trailer that had been their living quarters for almost three months. Strange thoughts were afloat in the chaos of his cool Orthan brain. Tonight or tomorrow night at the latest he must contact his two fellows and report that Earth was a planetary paradise. No other world, including Ortha, was so well-favored and rich. An expeditionary force to wipe the grotesque civilizations of Earth out of existence would, of course, be necessary before the first units of new Hordes could be landed. And there Thig balked. Why must they destroy these people, imperfect though their civilization might be, to make room for the Hordes? Thig tried to tell himself that it was the transmitted thoughts of the dead Earthman that made him feel so, but he was not too sure. For three months he had lived with people who loved, hated, wept and sacrificed for reasons that he had never known existed. He had learned the heady glory of thinking for himself and making his own decisions. He had experienced the primitive joy of matching his wits and tongue against the wits of other unpredictable human beings. There was no abrupt division of men and women into definite classes of endeavor. A laborer thought the same thoughts that a governor might think. Uncertainty added zest to every day's life. The Orthan had come to question the sole devotion of the individual to the Horde to the exclusion of all other interests. What, he wondered, would one new world—or a hundred—populated by the Hordes add to the progress of humanity? For a hundred thousand years the Orthan civilization had remained static, its energies directed into certain well-defined channels. They were mindless bees maintaining their vast mechanical hives. There was that moment on the brink of the Grand Canyon when Ellen had caught his arm breathlessly at all the beauty spread away there beneath them. There were mornings in the desert when the sun painted in lurid red the peaks above the harsh black-and-whites of the sagebrush and cactus slopes. There was the little boy, his body burning with fever, who nestled trustingly against his tense man's body and slept—the son of Ellen and the man he had destroyed. Thig groaned. He was a weakling to let sentimentality so get the better of his judgment. He would go now to the space ship and urge them to blast off for Ortha. He sprang off the porch and strode away down the road toward the beach. The children ran to him; wanted to go along. He sent them away harshly but they smiled and waved their brown little hands. Ellen came to the door and called after him. "Hurry home, dear," she said. "I'll have a bite ready in about an hour." He dared not say anything, for his voice would have broken and she would have known something was wrong. She was a very wise sort of person when something was troubling him. He waved his stubby paw of a hand to show that he had heard, and blindly hurried toward the Sound. Oddly enough, as he hurried away along the narrow path through the autumn woods, his mind busied itself with a new epic of the west that lived no longer. He mentally titled it: "Rustlers' Riot" and blocked in the outlines of his plot. One section of his brain was that of the careless author of gunslinging yarns, a section that seemed to be sapping the life from his own brain. He knew that the story would never be written, but he toyed with the idea. So far had Thig the emotionless, robot-being from Ortha drifted from the unquestioning worship of the Horde! "You have done well," announced Torp when Thig had completed his report on the resources and temperatures of various sections of Terra. "We now have located three worlds fit for colonization and so we will return to Ortha at once. "I will recommend the conquest of this planet, 72-P-3 at once and the complete destruction of all biped life upon it. The mental aberrations of the barbaric natives might lead to endless complications if they were permitted to exist outside our ordered way of life. I imagine that three circuits of the planet about its primary should prove sufficient for the purposes of complete liquidation." "But why," asked Thig slowly, "could we not disarm all the natives and exile them on one of the less desirable continents, Antarctica for example or Siberia? They are primitive humans even as our race was once a race of primitives. It is not our duty to help to attain our own degree of knowledge and comfort?" "Only the good of the Horde matters!" shouted Torp angrily. "Shall a race of feeble-witted beasts, such as these Earthmen, stand in the way of a superior race? We want their world, and so we will take it. The Law of the Horde states that all the universe is ours for the taking." "Let us get back to Ortha at once, then," gritted out Thig savagely. "Never again do I wish to set foot upon the soil of this mad planet. There are forces at work upon Earth that we of Ortha have long forgotten." "Check the blood of Thig for disease, Kam," ordered Torp shortly. "His words are highly irrational. Some form of fever perhaps native to this world. While you examine him I will blast off for Ortha." Thig followed Kam into the tiny laboratory and found a seat beside the squat scientist's desk. His eyes roamed over the familiar instruments and gauges, each in its own precise position in the cases along the walls. His gaze lingered longest on the stubby black ugliness of a decomposition blaster in its rack close to the deck. A blast of the invisible radiations from that weapon's hot throat and flesh or vegetable fiber rotted into flaky ashes. The ship trembled beneath their feet; it tore free from the feeble clutch of the sand about it, and they were rocketing skyward. Thig's broad fingers bit deep into the unyielding metal of his chair. Suddenly he knew that he must go back to Earth, back to Ellen and the children of the man he had helped destroy. He loved Ellen, and nothing must stand between them! The Hordes of Ortha must find some other world, an empty world—this planet was not for them. "Turn back!" he cried wildly. "I must go back to Earth. There is a woman there, helpless and alone, who needs me! The Horde does not need this planet." Kam eyed him coldly and lifted a shining hypodermic syringe from its case. He approached Thig warily, aware that disease often made a maniac of the finest members of the Horde. "No human being is more important than the Horde," he stated baldly. "This woman of whom you speak is merely one unit of the millions we must eliminate for the good of the Horde." Then it was that Thig went berserk. His fists slashed into the thick jaw of the scientist and his fingers ripped at the hard cords overlying the Orthan's vital throat tubes. His fingers and thumb gouged deep into Kam's startled throat and choked off any cry for assistance before it could be uttered. Kam's hand swept down to the holster swung from his intricate harness and dragged his blaster from it. Thig's other hand clamped over his and for long moments they swayed there, locked together in silent deadly struggle. The fate of a world hung in the balance as Kam's other hand fought against that lone arm of Thig. The scales swung in favor of Kam. Slowly the flaring snout of his weapon tilted upward until it reached the level of Thig's waist. Thig suddenly released his grip and dragged his enemy toward him. A sudden reversal of pressure on Kam's gun hand sent the weapon swivelling about full upon its owner's thick torso. Thig's fingers pressed down upon Kam's button finger, down upon the stud set into the grip of the decomposition blaster, and Kam's muscles turned to water. He shrieked. Before Thig's eyes half of his comrade's body sloughed away into foul corruption that swiftly gave way to hardened blobs of dessicated matter. Horror for what he had done—that he had slain one of his own Horde—made his limbs move woodenly. All of his thoughts were dulled for the moment. Painfully slow, he turned his body around toward the control blister, turned around on leaden feet, to look full into the narrowed icy eyes of his commander. He saw the heavy barrel of the blaster slashing down against his skull but he could not swing a fraction of an inch out of the way. His body seemed paralyzed. This was the end, he thought as he waited stupidly for the blow to fall, the end for Ellen and the kids and all the struggling races of Earth. He would never write another cowboy yarn—they would all be dead anyhow soon. Then a thunderclap exploded against his head and he dropped endlessly toward the deck. Blows rained against his skull. He wondered if Torp would ever cease to hammer at him and turn the deadly ray of the weapon upon him. Blood throbbed and pounded with every blow.... Bam, Bam, Bam, the blood pounded in his ears. Like repeated blows of a hammer they shook his booming head. No longer was Torp above him. He was in the corner of the laboratory, a crumpled blood-smeared heap of bruised flesh and bone. He was unfettered and the blood was caked upon his skull and in his matted hair. Torp must have thought he had killed him with those savage blows upon the head. Even Torp, thought Thig ruefully, gave way to the primitive rage of his ancestors at times; but to that very bit of unconscious atavism he now owed his life. A cool-headed robot of an Orthan would have efficiently used the blaster to destroy any possibility of remaining life in his unconscious body. Thig rolled slowly over so that his eye found the door into the control room. Torp would be coming back again to dispose of their bodies through the refuse lock. Already the body of Kam was gone. He wondered why he had been left until last. Perhaps Torp wished to take cultures of his blood and tissues to determine whether a disease was responsible for his sudden madness. The cases of fragile instruments were just above his head. Association of memories brought him the flash of the heavy blaster in its rack beneath them. His hand went up and felt the welcome hardness of the weapon. He tugged it free. In a moment he was on his knees crawling across the plates of the deck toward the door. Halfway across the floor he collapsed on his face, the metal of the gun making a harsh clang. He heard the feet of Torp scuffle out of silence and a choked cry in the man's throat squalled out into a senseless whinny. Thig raised himself up on a quivering elbow and slid the black length of the blaster in front of him. His eyes sought the doorway and stared full into the glaring vacant orbs of his commander. Torp leaned there watching him, his breath gurgling brokenly through his deep-bitten lips. The clawing marks of nails, fingernails, furrowed his face and chest. He was a madman! The deadly attack of Thig; his own violent avenging of Kam's death, and now the apparent return of the man he had killed come to life had all served to jolt his rigidly trained brain from its accustomed groove. The shock had been too much for the established thought-processes of the Orthan. So Thig shot him where he stood, mercifully, before that vacant mad stare set him, too, to gibbering and shrieking. Then he stepped over the skeleton-thing that had been Torp, using the new strength that victory had given him to drive him along. He had saved a world's civilization from extinction! The thought sobered him; yet, somehow, he was pleased that he had done so. After all, it had been the Earthwoman and the children he had been thinking of while he battled Kam, a selfish desire to protect them all. He went to the desk where Torp had been writing in the ship's log and read the last few nervously scrawled lines: Planet 72-P-3 unfit for colonization. Some pernicious disease that strikes at the brain centers and causes violent insanity is existent there. Thig, just returned from a survey of the planet, went mad and destroyed Kam. In turn I was forced to slay him. But it is not ended. Already I feel the insidious virus of.... And there his writing ended abruptly. Thig nodded. That would do it. He set the automatic pilot for the planet Ortha. Unless a rogue asteroid or a comet crossed the ship's path she would return safely to Ortha with that mute warning of danger on 72-P-3. The body of Torp would help to confirm his final message. Then Thig crossed the cabin to the auxiliary life boat there, one of a half-dozen space ships in miniature nested within the great ship's hull, and cut free from the mother vessel. He flipped the drive lever, felt the thrumming of the rockets driving him from the parent ship. The sensation of free flight against his new body was strangely exhilerating and heady. It was the newest of the emotions he had experienced on Earth since that day, so many months before, when he had felt the warmness of Ellen's lips tight against his. Thig flipped the drive lever, felt the thrumming of the rockets driving him from the parent ship. He swung about to the port, watched the flaming drive-rockets of the great exploratory ship hurl it toward far-away Ortha, and there was no regret in his mind that he was not returning to the planet of his first existence. He thought of the dull greys and blacks of his planet, of the monotonous routine of existence that had once been his—and his heart thrilled to the memories of the starry nights and perfect exciting days he had spent on his three month trip over Earth. He made a brief salute to the existence he had known, turned with a tiny sigh, and his fingers made brief adjustments in the controls. The rocket-thrum deepened, and the thin whistle of tenuous air clutching the ship echoed through the hull-plates. He thought of many things in those few moments. He watched the roundness of Earth flatten out, then take on the cup-like illusion that all planets had for an incoming ship. He reduced the drive of his rockets to a mere whisper, striving to control the impatience that crowded his mind. He shivered suddenly, remembering his utter callousness the first time he had sent a space ship whipping down toward the hills and valleys below. And there was a sickness within him when he fully realized that, despite his acquired memory and traits, he was an alien from outer space. He fingered the tiny scars that had completely obliterated the slight differences in his appearance from an Earthman's, and his fingers trembled a bit, as he bent and stared through the vision port. He said a brief prayer in his heart to a God whose presence he now felt very deeply. There were tears in the depths of his eyes, then, and memories were hot, bitter pains. Earth was not far below him. As he let gravity suck him earthward, he heaved a gasp of relief. He was no longer Thig, a creature of a Horde's creation, but Lewis Terry, writer of lurid gun-smoking tales of the West. He must remember that always. He had destroyed the real Terry and now, for the rest of his life, he must make up to the dead man's family. The knowledge that Ellen's love was not really meant for him would be a knife twisting in his heart but for her sake he must endure it. Her dreams and happiness must never be shattered. The bulge of Earth was flattening out now and he could see the outlines of Long Island in the growing twilight. A new plot was growing in the brain of Lewis Terry, a yarn about a cowboy suddenly transported to another world. He smiled ironically. He had seen those other worlds. Perhaps some day he would write about them.... He was Lewis Terry! He must remember that!

Who is Ellen and how does she affect Thig and his choices?

1

Ellen is Lewis Terry’s red-headed wife, and she has a major impact on Thig and his way of thinking. In the beginning, Thig is only interested in finding a new home for his people, the Orthans. However, from their first hug alone, Thig begins to have feelings for Ellen. He likes the way that she offers him food and coffee and knows when something is bothering him. He is pleased with her excitement when he shows her the treasure he found at the beach. Thig loves spending the three months with Ellen and her children in their trailer exploring the West. She appreciates the beautiful landscape of the Grand Canyon, but she also acknowledges that there isn’t anything more beautiful in the world than their little piece of land and sky at home. Thig realizes he has to kill Kam and Torp, his fellow Orthans, when he can’t stand the thought of leaving Ellen behind for good. He has experienced love and fun and curiosity with her, and he can’t go back to his old life as a member of the Horde. He loves Ellen, and he is willing to risk it all to be with her and take care of her, especially because he is the reason she is alone without a partner to look out for her.

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QUEST OF THIG By BASIL WELLS Thig of Ortha was the vanguard of the conquering "HORDE." He had blasted across trackless space to subdue a defenseless world—only to meet on Earth emotions that were more deadly than weapons. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Thig carefully smoothed the dark sand and seaweed of the lonely beach over the metal lid of the flexible ringed tunnel that linked the grubby ship from another planet with the upper air. He looked out across the heaving waters of the Sound toward Connecticut. He stared appraisingly around at the luxuriant green growth of foliage further inland; and started toward the little stretch of trees and brush, walking carefully because of the lesser gravitation. Thig was shorter than the average Earthman—although on Ortha he was well above the average in height—but his body was thick and powerfully muscled. His skull was well-shaped and large; his features were regular, perhaps a trifle oversize, and his hair and eyes were a curiously matching blend of reddish brown. Oddest of all, he wore no garments, other than the necessary belt and straps to support his rod-like weapon of white metal and his pouches for food and specimens. The Orthan entered the narrow strip of trees and crossed to the little-used highway on the other side. Here he patiently sat down to wait for an Earthman or an Earthwoman to pass. His task now was to bring a native, intact if possible, back to the carefully buried space cruiser where his two fellows and himself would drain the creature's mentality of all its knowledge. In this way they could learn whether a planet was suited for colonization by later swarms of Orthans. Already they had charted over a hundred celestial bodies but of them all only three had proven worthy of consideration. This latest planet, however, 72-P-3 on the chart, appeared to be an ideal world in every respect. Sunlight, plenty of water and a dense atmospheric envelope made of 72-P-3 a paradise among planets. The explorer from another world crouched into the concealment of a leafy shrub. A creature was approaching. Its squat body was covered with baggy strips of bluish cloth and it carried a jointed rod of metal and wood in its paw. It walked upright as did the men of Ortha. Thig's cold eyes opened a trifle wider as he stared into the thing's stupid face. It was as though he was looking into a bit of polished metal at the reflection of himself! The Earthman was opposite now and he must waste no more precious time. The mighty muscles of the Orthan sent him hurtling across the intervening space in two prodigious bounds, and his hands clamped across the mouth and neck of the stranger.... Lewis Terry was going fishing. For a week the typewriter mill that had ground out a thousand assorted yarns of the untamed West and the frigid desolation of the Northwoods had been silent. Lewis wondered if he was going stale. He had sat every day for eight hours in front of that shiny-buttoned bane of the typist, but there were no results. Feebly he had punched a key two days ago and a $ sign had appeared. He hadn't dared touch the machine since. For Mr. Terry, that hard-hitting writer of two-gun action, had never been further west of Long Island than Elizabeth, and he had promised his wife, Ellen, that he would take the three children and herself on a trailer tour of the West that very summer. Since that promise, he could not write a word. Visions of whooping red-skinned Apaches and be-chapped outlaws raiding his little trailer home kept rolling up out of his subconscious. Yet he had to write at least three novelets and a fistful of short stories in the next two weeks to finance the great adventure—or the trip was off. So Lewis left the weathered old cottage in the early dawn and headed for his tubby old boat at the landing in an attempt to work out a salable yarn.... "Hey!" he shouted as a naked man sprang out of the bushes beside the road. "What's the trouble?" Then he had no time for further speech, the massive arms of the stranger had wound around him and two hamlike hands shut off his speech and his wind. He fought futilely against trained muscles. The hand clamping his throat relaxed for a moment and hacked along the side of his head. Blackness flooded the brain of Lewis, and he knew no more. "There it is," announced Thig, dropping the limp body of the captured Earthman to the metal deck-plates. "It is a male of the species that must have built the cities we saw as we landed." "He resembles Thig," announced Kam. "But for the strange covering he wears he might be Thig." "Thig will be this creature!" announced Torp. "With a psychic relay we will transfer the Earthman's memories and meager store of knowledge to the brain of Thig! He can then go out and scout this world without arousing suspicion. While he is gone, I will take Kam and explore the two inner planets." "You are the commander," said Thig. "But I wish this beast did not wear these clumsy sheathing upon his body. On Ortha we do not hamper the use of our limbs so." "Do not question the word of your commander," growled Torp, swelling out his thick chest menacingly. "It is for the good of our people that you disguise yourself as an Earthman." "For the good of the Horde," Thig intoned almost piously as he lifted Terry's body and headed for the laboratory. Service for the Horde was all that the men of Ortha knew. Carefully cultured and brought to life in the laboratories of their Horde, they knew neither father nor mother. Affection and love were entirely lacking in their early training and later life. They were trained antlike from childhood that only the growth and power of the Horde were of any moment. Men and women alike toiled and died like unfeeling robots of flesh and bone for the Horde. The Horde was their religion, their love-life, their everything! So it was that the bodies of the Earthman and the Orthan were strapped on two parallel tables of chill metal and the twin helmets, linked to one another by the intricacies of the psychic relay, put upon their heads. For ten hours or more the droning hum of the relay sucked Terry's brain dry of knowledge. The shock upon the nervous system of the Earthman proved too violent and his heart faltered after a time and stopped completely. Twice, with subtle drugs they restored pseudo-life to his body and kept the electrical impulses throbbing from his tortured brain, but after the third suspension of life Thig removed his helmet. "There is nothing more to learn," he informed his impassive comrades. "Now, let us get on with the plastic surgery that is required. My new body must return to its barbaric household before undue attention is aroused. And when I return I will take along some of the gleaming baubles we found on the red planet—these people value them highly." An hour later, his scars and altered cartilage already healed and painless, Thig again scraped sand over the entrance to the space ship and set out along the moonlit beach toward the nearest path running inland to his home. Memory was laying the country bare about him, Terry's own childhood memories of this particular section of Long Island. Here was the place where Jake and Ted had helped him dig for the buried treasure that old 'Notch-ear' Beggs had told them so exactly about. Remembrance of that episode gave Thig an idea about the little lump of jewels in his pocket. He had found them in a chest along the beach! He was coming up on the porch now and at the sound of his foot on the sagging boards the screen door burst open and three little Earth-creatures were hugging at his legs. An odd sensation, that his acquired memories labeled as pleasure, sent a warm glow upward from around his heart. Then he saw the slender red-haired shape of a woman, the mate of the dead man he knew, and confusion struck his well-trained brain. Men had no mates on Ortha, sex had been overthrown with all the other primitive impulses of barbarism; so he was incapable of understanding the emotions that swept through his acquired memory. Unsteadily he took her in his arms and felt her warm lips pressed, trembling, against his own. That same hot wave of pulsing blood choked achingly up into his throat. "Lew, dear," Ellen was asking, "where have you been all day? I called up at the landing but you were not there. I wanted to let you know that Saddlebag Publications sent a check for $50 for "Reversed Revolvers" and three other editors asked for shorts soon." "Shoulda got a hundred bucks for that yarn," grunted Thig, and gasped. For the moment he had been Lewis Terry and not Thig! So thoroughly had he acquired the knowledge of Terry that he found himself unconsciously adopting the thinking and mannerism of the other. All the better this way, he realized—more natural. "Sorry I was late," he said, digging into his pocket for the glittering baubles, "but I was poking around on the beach where we used to hunt treasure and I found an old chest. Inside it I found nothing but a handful of these." He flashed the jewels in front of Ellen's startled eyes and she clung, unbelieving, to his arm. "Why, Lew," she gasped, "they're worth a fortune! We can buy that new trailer now and have a rebuilt motor in the car. We can go west right away.... Hollywood, the Grand Canyon, cowboys!" "Uh huh," agreed the pseudo Lewis, memories of the ferocious savages and gunmen of his stories rendering him acutely unhappy. Sincerely he hoped that the west had reformed. "I saved some kraut and weiners," Ellen said. "Get washed up while I'm warming them up. Kids ate all the bread so I had to borrow some from the Eskoes. Want coffee, too?" "Mmmmmm," came from the depths of the chipped white wash-basin. "Home again," whispered Ellen as she stood beside Thig twelve weeks later and gazed tearfully at the weathered little gray house. She knelt beside the front stoop and reached for the key hidden beneath it. "The west was wonderful; tremendous, vast and beautiful," she went on as they climbed the steps, "but nowhere was there any place as beautiful as our own little strip of sky and water." Thig sank into a dusty old swing that hung on creaking chains from the exposed rafters of the porch roof. He looked down at the dusty gray car and the bulbous silvery bulk of the trailer that had been their living quarters for almost three months. Strange thoughts were afloat in the chaos of his cool Orthan brain. Tonight or tomorrow night at the latest he must contact his two fellows and report that Earth was a planetary paradise. No other world, including Ortha, was so well-favored and rich. An expeditionary force to wipe the grotesque civilizations of Earth out of existence would, of course, be necessary before the first units of new Hordes could be landed. And there Thig balked. Why must they destroy these people, imperfect though their civilization might be, to make room for the Hordes? Thig tried to tell himself that it was the transmitted thoughts of the dead Earthman that made him feel so, but he was not too sure. For three months he had lived with people who loved, hated, wept and sacrificed for reasons that he had never known existed. He had learned the heady glory of thinking for himself and making his own decisions. He had experienced the primitive joy of matching his wits and tongue against the wits of other unpredictable human beings. There was no abrupt division of men and women into definite classes of endeavor. A laborer thought the same thoughts that a governor might think. Uncertainty added zest to every day's life. The Orthan had come to question the sole devotion of the individual to the Horde to the exclusion of all other interests. What, he wondered, would one new world—or a hundred—populated by the Hordes add to the progress of humanity? For a hundred thousand years the Orthan civilization had remained static, its energies directed into certain well-defined channels. They were mindless bees maintaining their vast mechanical hives. There was that moment on the brink of the Grand Canyon when Ellen had caught his arm breathlessly at all the beauty spread away there beneath them. There were mornings in the desert when the sun painted in lurid red the peaks above the harsh black-and-whites of the sagebrush and cactus slopes. There was the little boy, his body burning with fever, who nestled trustingly against his tense man's body and slept—the son of Ellen and the man he had destroyed. Thig groaned. He was a weakling to let sentimentality so get the better of his judgment. He would go now to the space ship and urge them to blast off for Ortha. He sprang off the porch and strode away down the road toward the beach. The children ran to him; wanted to go along. He sent them away harshly but they smiled and waved their brown little hands. Ellen came to the door and called after him. "Hurry home, dear," she said. "I'll have a bite ready in about an hour." He dared not say anything, for his voice would have broken and she would have known something was wrong. She was a very wise sort of person when something was troubling him. He waved his stubby paw of a hand to show that he had heard, and blindly hurried toward the Sound. Oddly enough, as he hurried away along the narrow path through the autumn woods, his mind busied itself with a new epic of the west that lived no longer. He mentally titled it: "Rustlers' Riot" and blocked in the outlines of his plot. One section of his brain was that of the careless author of gunslinging yarns, a section that seemed to be sapping the life from his own brain. He knew that the story would never be written, but he toyed with the idea. So far had Thig the emotionless, robot-being from Ortha drifted from the unquestioning worship of the Horde! "You have done well," announced Torp when Thig had completed his report on the resources and temperatures of various sections of Terra. "We now have located three worlds fit for colonization and so we will return to Ortha at once. "I will recommend the conquest of this planet, 72-P-3 at once and the complete destruction of all biped life upon it. The mental aberrations of the barbaric natives might lead to endless complications if they were permitted to exist outside our ordered way of life. I imagine that three circuits of the planet about its primary should prove sufficient for the purposes of complete liquidation." "But why," asked Thig slowly, "could we not disarm all the natives and exile them on one of the less desirable continents, Antarctica for example or Siberia? They are primitive humans even as our race was once a race of primitives. It is not our duty to help to attain our own degree of knowledge and comfort?" "Only the good of the Horde matters!" shouted Torp angrily. "Shall a race of feeble-witted beasts, such as these Earthmen, stand in the way of a superior race? We want their world, and so we will take it. The Law of the Horde states that all the universe is ours for the taking." "Let us get back to Ortha at once, then," gritted out Thig savagely. "Never again do I wish to set foot upon the soil of this mad planet. There are forces at work upon Earth that we of Ortha have long forgotten." "Check the blood of Thig for disease, Kam," ordered Torp shortly. "His words are highly irrational. Some form of fever perhaps native to this world. While you examine him I will blast off for Ortha." Thig followed Kam into the tiny laboratory and found a seat beside the squat scientist's desk. His eyes roamed over the familiar instruments and gauges, each in its own precise position in the cases along the walls. His gaze lingered longest on the stubby black ugliness of a decomposition blaster in its rack close to the deck. A blast of the invisible radiations from that weapon's hot throat and flesh or vegetable fiber rotted into flaky ashes. The ship trembled beneath their feet; it tore free from the feeble clutch of the sand about it, and they were rocketing skyward. Thig's broad fingers bit deep into the unyielding metal of his chair. Suddenly he knew that he must go back to Earth, back to Ellen and the children of the man he had helped destroy. He loved Ellen, and nothing must stand between them! The Hordes of Ortha must find some other world, an empty world—this planet was not for them. "Turn back!" he cried wildly. "I must go back to Earth. There is a woman there, helpless and alone, who needs me! The Horde does not need this planet." Kam eyed him coldly and lifted a shining hypodermic syringe from its case. He approached Thig warily, aware that disease often made a maniac of the finest members of the Horde. "No human being is more important than the Horde," he stated baldly. "This woman of whom you speak is merely one unit of the millions we must eliminate for the good of the Horde." Then it was that Thig went berserk. His fists slashed into the thick jaw of the scientist and his fingers ripped at the hard cords overlying the Orthan's vital throat tubes. His fingers and thumb gouged deep into Kam's startled throat and choked off any cry for assistance before it could be uttered. Kam's hand swept down to the holster swung from his intricate harness and dragged his blaster from it. Thig's other hand clamped over his and for long moments they swayed there, locked together in silent deadly struggle. The fate of a world hung in the balance as Kam's other hand fought against that lone arm of Thig. The scales swung in favor of Kam. Slowly the flaring snout of his weapon tilted upward until it reached the level of Thig's waist. Thig suddenly released his grip and dragged his enemy toward him. A sudden reversal of pressure on Kam's gun hand sent the weapon swivelling about full upon its owner's thick torso. Thig's fingers pressed down upon Kam's button finger, down upon the stud set into the grip of the decomposition blaster, and Kam's muscles turned to water. He shrieked. Before Thig's eyes half of his comrade's body sloughed away into foul corruption that swiftly gave way to hardened blobs of dessicated matter. Horror for what he had done—that he had slain one of his own Horde—made his limbs move woodenly. All of his thoughts were dulled for the moment. Painfully slow, he turned his body around toward the control blister, turned around on leaden feet, to look full into the narrowed icy eyes of his commander. He saw the heavy barrel of the blaster slashing down against his skull but he could not swing a fraction of an inch out of the way. His body seemed paralyzed. This was the end, he thought as he waited stupidly for the blow to fall, the end for Ellen and the kids and all the struggling races of Earth. He would never write another cowboy yarn—they would all be dead anyhow soon. Then a thunderclap exploded against his head and he dropped endlessly toward the deck. Blows rained against his skull. He wondered if Torp would ever cease to hammer at him and turn the deadly ray of the weapon upon him. Blood throbbed and pounded with every blow.... Bam, Bam, Bam, the blood pounded in his ears. Like repeated blows of a hammer they shook his booming head. No longer was Torp above him. He was in the corner of the laboratory, a crumpled blood-smeared heap of bruised flesh and bone. He was unfettered and the blood was caked upon his skull and in his matted hair. Torp must have thought he had killed him with those savage blows upon the head. Even Torp, thought Thig ruefully, gave way to the primitive rage of his ancestors at times; but to that very bit of unconscious atavism he now owed his life. A cool-headed robot of an Orthan would have efficiently used the blaster to destroy any possibility of remaining life in his unconscious body. Thig rolled slowly over so that his eye found the door into the control room. Torp would be coming back again to dispose of their bodies through the refuse lock. Already the body of Kam was gone. He wondered why he had been left until last. Perhaps Torp wished to take cultures of his blood and tissues to determine whether a disease was responsible for his sudden madness. The cases of fragile instruments were just above his head. Association of memories brought him the flash of the heavy blaster in its rack beneath them. His hand went up and felt the welcome hardness of the weapon. He tugged it free. In a moment he was on his knees crawling across the plates of the deck toward the door. Halfway across the floor he collapsed on his face, the metal of the gun making a harsh clang. He heard the feet of Torp scuffle out of silence and a choked cry in the man's throat squalled out into a senseless whinny. Thig raised himself up on a quivering elbow and slid the black length of the blaster in front of him. His eyes sought the doorway and stared full into the glaring vacant orbs of his commander. Torp leaned there watching him, his breath gurgling brokenly through his deep-bitten lips. The clawing marks of nails, fingernails, furrowed his face and chest. He was a madman! The deadly attack of Thig; his own violent avenging of Kam's death, and now the apparent return of the man he had killed come to life had all served to jolt his rigidly trained brain from its accustomed groove. The shock had been too much for the established thought-processes of the Orthan. So Thig shot him where he stood, mercifully, before that vacant mad stare set him, too, to gibbering and shrieking. Then he stepped over the skeleton-thing that had been Torp, using the new strength that victory had given him to drive him along. He had saved a world's civilization from extinction! The thought sobered him; yet, somehow, he was pleased that he had done so. After all, it had been the Earthwoman and the children he had been thinking of while he battled Kam, a selfish desire to protect them all. He went to the desk where Torp had been writing in the ship's log and read the last few nervously scrawled lines: Planet 72-P-3 unfit for colonization. Some pernicious disease that strikes at the brain centers and causes violent insanity is existent there. Thig, just returned from a survey of the planet, went mad and destroyed Kam. In turn I was forced to slay him. But it is not ended. Already I feel the insidious virus of.... And there his writing ended abruptly. Thig nodded. That would do it. He set the automatic pilot for the planet Ortha. Unless a rogue asteroid or a comet crossed the ship's path she would return safely to Ortha with that mute warning of danger on 72-P-3. The body of Torp would help to confirm his final message. Then Thig crossed the cabin to the auxiliary life boat there, one of a half-dozen space ships in miniature nested within the great ship's hull, and cut free from the mother vessel. He flipped the drive lever, felt the thrumming of the rockets driving him from the parent ship. The sensation of free flight against his new body was strangely exhilerating and heady. It was the newest of the emotions he had experienced on Earth since that day, so many months before, when he had felt the warmness of Ellen's lips tight against his. Thig flipped the drive lever, felt the thrumming of the rockets driving him from the parent ship. He swung about to the port, watched the flaming drive-rockets of the great exploratory ship hurl it toward far-away Ortha, and there was no regret in his mind that he was not returning to the planet of his first existence. He thought of the dull greys and blacks of his planet, of the monotonous routine of existence that had once been his—and his heart thrilled to the memories of the starry nights and perfect exciting days he had spent on his three month trip over Earth. He made a brief salute to the existence he had known, turned with a tiny sigh, and his fingers made brief adjustments in the controls. The rocket-thrum deepened, and the thin whistle of tenuous air clutching the ship echoed through the hull-plates. He thought of many things in those few moments. He watched the roundness of Earth flatten out, then take on the cup-like illusion that all planets had for an incoming ship. He reduced the drive of his rockets to a mere whisper, striving to control the impatience that crowded his mind. He shivered suddenly, remembering his utter callousness the first time he had sent a space ship whipping down toward the hills and valleys below. And there was a sickness within him when he fully realized that, despite his acquired memory and traits, he was an alien from outer space. He fingered the tiny scars that had completely obliterated the slight differences in his appearance from an Earthman's, and his fingers trembled a bit, as he bent and stared through the vision port. He said a brief prayer in his heart to a God whose presence he now felt very deeply. There were tears in the depths of his eyes, then, and memories were hot, bitter pains. Earth was not far below him. As he let gravity suck him earthward, he heaved a gasp of relief. He was no longer Thig, a creature of a Horde's creation, but Lewis Terry, writer of lurid gun-smoking tales of the West. He must remember that always. He had destroyed the real Terry and now, for the rest of his life, he must make up to the dead man's family. The knowledge that Ellen's love was not really meant for him would be a knife twisting in his heart but for her sake he must endure it. Her dreams and happiness must never be shattered. The bulge of Earth was flattening out now and he could see the outlines of Long Island in the growing twilight. A new plot was growing in the brain of Lewis Terry, a yarn about a cowboy suddenly transported to another world. He smiled ironically. He had seen those other worlds. Perhaps some day he would write about them.... He was Lewis Terry! He must remember that!

Who is Ellen and how does she affect Thig and his choices?

2

Ellen is Lewis Terry’s wife who unknowingly makes Thig fall in love. Ellen is a supportive wife who celebrates her husband’s accomplishments when he sells a story. She is excited when Thig shows her the gems they can use to finance their trip out West. Ellen thinks of her husband’s needs, and rather than fussing at him when he comes home late, she asks where he has been but immediately shifts to caring for his needs. Thig enjoys sharing the beautiful views of the West with Ellen, and he likes matching wits with her. From her, he learns what he and other Orthans are missing by not having meaningful relationships with members of the opposite sex. Thig is touched by her sensitivity to his moods and her understanding when something is troubling him. When Torp announces that Earth is a perfect planet for the Orthans to take over, Thig knows this means they will kill all the humans. He thinks of Ellen as helpless and alone and cannot bear to be separated from her; he wants to return to her and protect her. He realizes he loves her and that he will sacrifice his Orthan identity to be with her and support her dreams and happiness.

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Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net GRIFTERS' ASTEROID By H. L. GOLD Harvey and Joe were the slickest con-men ever to gyp a space-lane sucker. Or so they thought! Angus Johnson knew differently. He charged them five buckos for a glass of water—and got it! [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories May 1943. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Characteristically, Harvey Ellsworth tried to maintain his dignity, though his parched tongue was almost hanging out. But Joe Mallon, with no dignity to maintain, lurched across the rubbish-strewn patch of land that had been termed a spaceport. When Harvey staggered pontifically into the battered metalloy saloon—the only one on Planetoid 42—his tall, gangling partner was already stumbling out, mouthing something incoherent. They met in the doorway, violently. "We're delirious!" Joe cried. "It's a mirage!" "What is?" asked Harvey through a mouthful of cotton. Joe reeled aside, and Harvey saw what had upset his partner. He stared, speechless for once. In their hectic voyages from planet to planet, the pair of panacea purveyors had encountered the usual strange life-forms. But never had they seen anything like the amazing creature in that colonial saloon. Paying no attention to them, it was carrying a case of liquor in two hands, six siphons in two others, and a broom and dustpan in the remaining pair. The bartender, a big man resembling the plumpish Harvey in build, was leaning negligently on the counter, ordering this impossible being to fill the partly-emptied bottles, squeeze fruit juice and sweep the floor, all of which the native did simultaneously. "Nonsense," Harvey croaked uncertainly. "We have seen enough queer things to know there are always more." He led the way inside. Through thirst-cracked lips he rasped: "Water—quick!" Without a word, the bartender reached under the counter, brought out two glasses of water. The interplanetary con-men drank noisily, asked for more, until they had drunk eight glasses. Meanwhile, the bartender had taken out eight jiggers and filled them with whiskey. Harvey and Joe were breathing hard from having gulped the water so fast, but they were beginning to revive. They noticed the bartender's impersonal eyes studying them shrewdly. "Strangers, eh?" he asked at last. "Solar salesmen, my colonial friend," Harvey answered in his usual lush manner. "We purvey that renowned Martian remedy, La-anago Yergis , the formula for which was recently discovered by ourselves in the ancient ruined city of La-anago. Medical science is unanimous in proclaiming this magic medicine the sole panacea in the entire history of therapeutics." "Yeah?" said the bartender disinterestedly, polishing the chaser glasses without washing them. "Where you heading?" "Out of Mars for Ganymede. Our condenser broke down, and we've gone without water for five ghastly days." "Got a mechanic around this dumping ground you call a port?" Joe asked. "We did. He came near starving and moved on to Titan. Ships don't land here unless they're in trouble." "Then where's the water lead-in? We'll fill up and push off." "Mayor takes care of that," replied the saloon owner. "If you gents're finished at the bar, your drinks'll be forty buckos." Harvey grinned puzzledly. "We didn't take any whiskey." "Might as well. Water's five buckos a glass. Liquor's free with every chaser." Harvey's eyes bulged. Joe gulped. "That—that's robbery!" the lanky man managed to get out in a thin quaver. The barkeeper shrugged. "When there ain't many customers, you gotta make more on each one. Besides—" "Besides nothing!" Joe roared, finding his voice again. "You dirty crook—robbing poor spacemen! You—" "You dirty crook!" Joe roared. "Robbing honest spacemen!" Harvey nudged him warningly. "Easy, my boy, easy." He turned to the bartender apologetically. "Don't mind my friend. His adrenal glands are sometimes overactive. You were going to say—?" The round face of the barkeeper had assumed an aggrieved expression. "Folks are always thinkin' the other feller's out to do 'em," he said, shaking his head. "Lemme explain about the water here. It's bitter as some kinds of sin before it's purified. Have to bring it in with buckets and make it sweet. That takes time and labor. Waddya think—I was chargin' feller critters for water just out of devilment? I charge because I gotta." "Friend," said Harvey, taking out a wallet and counting off eight five-bucko bills, "here is your money. What's fair is fair, and you have put a different complexion on what seemed at first to be an unconscionable interjection of a middleman between Nature and man's thirst." The saloon man removed his dirty apron and came around the bar. "If that's an apology, I accept it. Now the mayor'll discuss filling your tanks. That's me. I'm also justice of the peace, official recorder, fire chief...." "And chief of police, no doubt," said Harvey jocosely. "Nope. That's my son, Jed. Angus Johnson's my name. Folks here just call me Chief. I run this town, and run it right. How much water will you need?" Joe estimated quickly. "About seventy-five liters, if we go on half rations," he answered. He waited apprehensively. "Let's say ten buckos a liter," the mayor said. "On account of the quantity, I'm able to quote a bargain price. Shucks, boys, it hurts me more to charge for water than it does for you to pay. I just got to, that's all." The mayor gestured to the native, who shuffled out to the tanks with them. The planetoid man worked the pump while the mayor intently watched the crude level-gauge, crying "Stop!" when it registered the proper amount. Then Johnson rubbed his thumb on his index finger and wetted his lips expectantly. Harvey bravely counted off the bills. He asked: "But what are we to do about replenishing our battery fluid? Ten buckos a liter would be preposterous. We simply can't afford it." Johnson's response almost floored them. "Who said anything about charging you for battery water? You can have all you want for nothing. It's just the purified stuff that comes so high." After giving them directions that would take them to the free-water pool, the ponderous factotum of Planetoid 42 shook hands and headed back to the saloon. His six-armed assistant followed him inside. "Now do you see, my hot-tempered colleague?" said Harvey as he and Joe picked up buckets that hung on the tank. "Johnson, as I saw instantly, is the victim of a difficult environment, and must charge accordingly." "Just the same," Joe griped, "paying for water isn't something you can get used to in ten minutes." In the fragile forest, they soon came across a stream that sprang from the igneous soil and splashed into the small pond whose contents, according to the mayor, was theirs for the asking. They filled their buckets and hauled them to the ship, then returned for more. It was on the sixth trip that Joe caught a glimpse of Jupiter-shine on a bright surface off to the left. The figure, 750, with the bucko sign in front of it, was still doing acrobatics inside his skull and keeping a faint suspicion alive in him. So he called Harvey and they went to investigate. Among the skimpy ground-crawling vines, they saw a long slender mound that was unmistakably a buried pipe. "What's this doing here?" Harvey asked, puzzled. "I thought Johnson had to transport water in pails." "Wonder where it leads to," Joe said uneasily. "It leads to the saloon," said Harvey, his eyes rapidly tracing the pipe back toward the spaceport. "What I am concerned with is where it leads from ." Five minutes later, panting heavily from the unaccustomed exertion of scrambling through the tangle of planetorial undergrowth, they burst into the open—before a clear, sparkling pool. Mutely, Harvey pointed out a pipe-end jutting under the water. "I am growing suspicious," he said in a rigidly controlled voice. But Joe was already on his knees, scooping up a handful of water and tasting it. "Sweet!" he snarled. They rushed back to the first pool, where Joe again tasted a sample. His mouth went wry. "Bitter! He uses only one pool, the sweet one! The only thing that needs purifying around here is that blasted mayor's conscience." "The asteroidal Poobah has tricked us with a slick come-on," said Harvey slowly. His eyes grew cold. "Joseph, the good-natured artist in me has become a hard and merciless avenger. I shall not rest until we have had the best of this colonial con-man! Watch your cues from this point hence." Fists clenched, the two returned to the saloon. But at the door they stopped and their fists unclenched. "Thought you gents were leaving," the mayor called out, seeing them frozen in the doorway. "Glad you didn't. Now you can meet my son, Jed. Him and me are the whole Earthman population of Johnson City." "You don't need any more," said Harvey, dismayed. Johnson's eight-foot son, topped by a massive roof of sun-bleached hair and held up by a foundation that seemed immovable, had obviously been born and raised in low gravity. For any decent-sized world would have kept him down near the general dimensions of a man. He held out an acre of palm. Harvey studied it worriedly, put his own hand somewhere on it, swallowed as it closed, then breathed again when his fingers were released in five units instead of a single compressed one. "Pleased to meet you," piped a voice that had never known a dense atmosphere. The pursuit of vengeance, Harvey realized, had taken a quick and unpleasant turn. Something shrewd was called for.... "Joseph!" he exclaimed, looking at his partner in alarm. "Don't you feel well?" Even before the others could turn to him, Joe's practiced eyes were gently crossing. He sagged against the door frame, all his features drooping like a bloodhound's. "Bring him in here!" Johnson cried. "I mean, get him away! He's coming down with asteroid fever!" "Of course," replied Harvey calmly. "Any fool knows the first symptoms of the disease that once scourged the universe." "What do you mean, once ?" demanded Johnson. "I come down with it every year, and I ain't hankering to have it in an off-season. Get him out of here!" "In good time. He can't be moved immediately." "Then he'll be here for months!" Harvey helped Joe to the counter and lifted him up on it. The mayor and his gigantic offspring were cowering across the room, trying to breathe in tiny, uncontaminating gasps. "You'll find everything you want in the back room," Johnson said frantically, "sulfopyridine, mustard plasters, rubs, inhalers, suction cups—" "Relics of the past," Harvey stated. "One medication is all modern man requires to combat the dread menace, asteroid fever." "What's that?" asked the mayor without conviction. Instead of replying, Harvey hurried outside to the ungainly second-hand rocket ship in the center of the shabby spaceport. He returned within a few minutes, carrying a bottle. Joe was still stretched out on the bar, panting, his eyes slowly crossing and uncrossing. Harvey lifted the patient's head tenderly, put the bottle to his lips and tilted it until he was forced to drink. When Joe tried to pull away, Harvey was inexorable. He made his partner drink until most of the liquid was gone. Then he stepped back and waited for the inevitable result. Joe's performance was better than ever. He lay supine for several moments, his face twisted into an expression that seemed doomed to perpetual wryness. Slowly, however, he sat up and his features straightened out. "Are—are you all right?" asked the mayor anxiously. "Much better," said Joe in a weak voice. "Maybe you need another dose," Harvey suggested. Joe recoiled. "I'm fine now!" he cried, and sprang off the bar to prove it. Astonished, Johnson and his son drew closer. They searched Joe's face, and then the mayor timidly felt his pulse. "Well, I'll be hanged!" Johnson ejaculated. " La-anago Yergis never fails, my friend," Harvey explained. "By actual test, it conquers asteroid fever in from four to twenty-three minutes, depending on the severity of the attack. Luckily, we caught this one before it grew formidable." The mayor's eyes became clouded mirrors of an inward conflict. "If you don't charge too much," he said warily, "I might think of buying some." "We do not sell this unbelievable remedy," Harvey replied with dignity. "It sells itself." "'Course, I'd expect a considerable reduction if I bought a whole case," said Johnson. "That would be the smallest investment you could make, compared with the vast loss of time and strength the fever involves." "How much?" asked the mayor unhappily. "For you, since you have taken us in so hospitably, a mere five hundred buckos." Johnson did not actually stagger back, but he gave the impression of doing so. "F-four hundred," he offered. "Not a red cent less than four seventy-five," Harvey said flatly. "Make it four fifty," quavered Johnson. "I dislike haggling," said Harvey. The final price, however, was four hundred and sixty-nine buckos and fifty redsents. Magnanimously, Harvey added: "And we will include, gratis , an elegant bottle-opener, a superb product of Mercurian handicraftsmanship." Johnson stabbed out a warning finger. "No tricks now. I want a taste of that stuff. You're not switching some worthless junk on me." Harvey took a glass from the bar and poured him a generous sample. The mayor sniffed it, grimaced, then threw it down his gullet. The ensuing minute saw a grim battle between a man and his stomach, a battle which the man gradually won. "There ain't no words for that taste," he gulped when it was safe to talk again. "Medicine," Harvey propounded, "should taste like medicine." To Joe he said: "Come, my esteemed colleague. We must perform the sacred task to which we have dedicated ourselves." With Joe stumbling along behind, he left the saloon, crossed the clearing and entered the ship. As soon as they were inside, Joe dropped his murderous silence and cried: "What kind of a dirty trick was that, giving me poison instead of that snake oil?" "That was not poison," Harvey contradicted quietly. "It was La-anago Yergis extract, plus." "Plus what—arsenic?" "Now, Joseph! Consider my quandary when I came back here to manufacture our specific for all known ailments, with the intention of selling yonder asteroidal tin-horn a bill of medical goods—an entire case, mind you. Was I to mix the extract with the water for which we had been swindled to the tune of ten buckos a liter? Where would our profit have been, then? No; I had to use the bitter free water, of course." "But why use it on me?" Joe demanded furiously. Harvey looked reprovingly at his gangling partner. "Did Johnson ask to taste it, or did he not? One must look ahead, Joseph. I had to produce the same medicine that we will now manufacture. Thus, you were a guinea pig for a splendid cause." "Okay, okay," Joe said. "But you shoulda charged him more." "Joseph, I promise you that we shall get back every redsent of which that swindler cheated us, besides whatever other funds or valuables he possesses. We could not be content with less." "Well, we're starting all right," admitted Joe. "How about that thing with six arms? He looks like a valuable. Can't we grab him off?" Harvey stopped filling bottles and looked up pensively. "I have every hope of luring away the profitable monstrosity. Apparently you have also surmised the fortune we could make with him. At first I purpose to exhibit him on our interplanetary tours with our streamlined panacea; he would be a spectacular attraction for bucolic suckers. Later, a brief period of demonstrating his abilities on the audio-visiphone. Then our triumph—we shall sell him at a stupendous figure to the zoo!" Joe was still dazed by that monetary vista when he and Harvey carried the case of medicine to the saloon. The mayor had already cleared a place of honor in the cluttered back room, where he told them to put it down carefully. Then he took the elaborate bottle-opener Harvey gave him, reverently uncorked a bottle and sampled it. It must have been at least as good as the first; he gagged. "That's the stuff, all right," he said, swallowing hard. He counted out the money into Harvey's hand, at a moderate rate that precariously balanced between his pleasure at getting the fever remedy and his pain at paying for it. Then he glanced out to see the position of Jupiter, and asked: "You gents eaten yet? The restaurant's open now." Harvey and Joe looked at each other. They hadn't been thinking about food at all, but suddenly they realized that they were hungry. "It's only water we were short of," Harvey said apprehensively. "We've got rations back at the ship." " H-mph! " the mayor grunted. "Powdered concentrates. Compressed pap. Suit yourselves. We treat our stomachs better here. And you're welcome to our hospitality." "Your hospitality," said Harvey, "depends on the prices you charge." "Well, if that's what's worrying you, you can stop worrying," answered the mayor promptly. "What's more, the kind of dinner I serve here you can't get anywhere else for any price." Swiftly, Harvey conned the possibilities of being bilked again. He saw none. "Let's take a look at the menu, anyhow, Joe," he said guardedly. Johnson immediately fell into the role of "mine host." "Come right in, gents," he invited. "Right into the dining room." He seated them at a table, which a rope tied between posts made more or less private, though nobody else was in the saloon and there was little chance of company. Genius, the six-armed native, appeared from the dingy kitchen with two menus in one hand, two glasses of water in another, plus napkins, silverware, a pitcher, plates, saucers, cups, and their cocktails, which were on the house. Then he stood by for orders. Harvey and Joe studied the menu critically. The prices were phenomenally low. When they glanced up at Johnson in perplexity, he grinned, bowed and asked: "Everything satisfactory, gents?" "Quite," said Harvey. "We shall order." For an hour they were served amazing dishes, both fresh and canned, the culinary wealth of this planetoid and all the system. And the service was as extraordinary as the meal itself. With four hands, Genius played deftly upon a pair of mellow Venusian viotars , using his other two hands for waiting on the table. "We absolutely must purchase this incredible specimen," Harvey whispered excitedly when Johnson and the native were both in the kitchen, attending to the next course. "He would make any society hostess's season a riotous success, which should be worth a great sum to women like Mrs. van Schuyler-Morgan, merely for his hire." "Think of a fast one fast," Joe agreed. "You're right." "But I dislike having to revise my opinion of a man so often," complained Harvey. "I wish Johnson would stay either swindler or honest merchant. This dinner is worth as least twenty buckos, yet I estimate our check at a mere bucko twenty redsents." The mayor's appearance prevented them from continuing the discussion. "It's been a great honor, gents," he said. "Ain't often I have visitors, and I like the best, like you two gents." As if on cue, Genius came out and put the check down between Joe and Harvey. Harvey picked it up negligently, but his casual air vanished in a yelp of horror. "What the devil is this?" he shouted.—"How do you arrive at this fantastic, idiotic figure— three hundred and twenty-eight buckos !" Johnson didn't answer. Neither did Genius; he simply put on the table, not a fingerbowl, but a magnifying glass. With one of his thirty fingers he pointed politely to the bottom of the menu. Harvey focused on the microscopic print, and his face went pasty with rage. The minute note read: "Services and entertainment, 327 buckos 80 redsents." "You can go to hell!" Joe growled. "We won't pay it!" Johnson sighed ponderously. "I was afraid you'd act like that," he said with regret. He pulled a tin badge out of his rear pocket, pinned it on his vest, and twisted his holstered gun into view. "Afraid I'll have to ask the sheriff to take over." Johnson, the "sheriff," collected the money, and Johnson, the "restaurateur," pocketed it. Meanwhile, Harvey tipped Joe the sign to remain calm. "My friend," he said to the mayor, and his tones took on a schoolmasterish severity, "your long absence from Earth has perhaps made you forget those elements of human wisdom that have entered the folk-lore of your native planet. Such as, for example: 'It is folly to kill a goose that lays golden eggs,' and 'Penny wise is pound foolish.'" "I don't get the connection," objected Johnson. "Well, by obliging us to pay such a high price for your dinner, you put out of your reach the chance of profiting from a really substantial deal. My partner and I were prepared to make you a sizable offer for the peculiar creature you call Genius. But by reducing our funds the way you have—" "Who said I wanted to sell him?" the mayor interrupted. He rubbed his fingers together and asked disinterestedly: "What were you going to offer, anyhow?" "It doesn't matter any longer," Harvey said with elaborate carelessness. "Perhaps you wouldn't have accepted it, anyway." "That's right," Johnson came back emphatically. "But what would your offer have been which I would have turned down?" "Which one? The one we were going to make, or the one we can make now?" "Either one. It don't make no difference. Genius is too valuable to sell." "Oh, come now, Mr. Johnson. Don't tell me no amount of money would tempt you!" "Nope. But how much did you say?" "Ah, then you will consider releasing Genius!" "Well, I'll tell you something," said the mayor confidentially. "When you've got one thing, you've got one thing. But when you've got money, it's the same as having a lot of things. Because, if you've got money, you can buy this and that and this and that and—" "This and that," concluded Joe. "We'll give you five hundred buckos." "Now, gents!" Johnson remonstrated. "Why, six hundred would hardly—" "You haven't left us much money," Harvey put in. The mayor frowned. "All right, we'll split the difference. Make it five-fifty." Harvey was quick to pay out, for this was a genuine windfall. Then he stood up and admired the astonishing possession he had so inexpensively acquired. "I really hate to deprive you of this unique creature," he said to Johnson. "I should imagine you will be rather lonely, with only your filial mammoth to keep you company." "I sure will," Johnson confessed glumly. "I got pretty attached to Genius, and I'm going to miss him something awful." Harvey forcibly removed his eyes from the native, who was clearing off the table almost all at once. "My friend," he said, "we take your only solace, it is true, but in his place we can offer something no less amazing and instructive." The mayor's hand went protectively to his pocket. "What is it?" he asked with the suspicion of a man who has seen human nature at its worst and expects nothing better. "Joseph, get our most prized belonging from the communications room of the ship," Harvey instructed. To Johnson he explained: "You must see the wondrous instrument before its value can be appreciated. My partner will soon have it here for your astonishment." Joe's face grew as glum as Johnson's had been. "Aw, Harv," he protested, "do we have to sell it? And right when I thought we were getting the key!" "We must not be selfish, my boy," Harvey said nobly. "We have had our chance; now we must relinquish Fate to the hands of a man who might have more success than we. Go, Joseph. Bring it here." Unwillingly, Joe turned and shuffled out. On a larger and heavier world than Planetoid 42, Johnson's curiosity would probably have had weight and mass. He was bursting with questions, but he was obviously afraid they would cost him money. For his part, Harvey allowed that curiosity to grow like a Venusian amoeba until Joe came in, lugging a radio. "Is that what you were talking about?" the mayor snorted. "What makes you think I want a radio? I came here to get away from singers and political speech-makers." "Do not jump to hasty conclusions," Harvey cautioned. "Another word, and I shall refuse you the greatest opportunity any man has ever had, with the sole exceptions of Joseph, myself and the unfortunate inventor of this absolutely awe-inspiring device." "I ain't in the market for a radio," Johnson said stubbornly. Harvey nodded in relief. "We have attempted to repay our host, Joseph. He has spurned our generosity. We have now the chance to continue our study, which I am positive will soon reward us with the key to an enormous fortune." "Well, that's no plating off our bow," Joe grunted. "I'm glad he did turn it down. I hated to give it up after working on it for three whole years." He picked up the radio and began walking toward the door. "Now, hold on!" the mayor cried. "I ain't saying I'll buy, but what is it I'm turning down?" Joe returned and set the instrument down on the bar. His face sorrowful, Harvey fondly stroked the scarred plasticoid cabinet. "To make a long story, Mr. Johnson," he said, "Joseph and I were among the chosen few who knew the famous Doctor Dean intimately. Just before his tragic death, you will recall, Dean allegedly went insane." He banged his fist on the bar. "I have said it before, and I repeat again, that was a malicious lie, spread by the doctor's enemies to discredit his greatest invention—this fourth dimensional radio!" "This what?" Johnson blurted out. "In simple terms," clarified Harvey, "the ingenious doctor discovered that the yawning chasm between the dimensions could be bridged by energy of all quanta. There has never been any question that the inhabitants of the super-dimension would be far more civilized than ourselves. Consequently, the man who could tap their knowledge would find himself in possession of a powerful, undreamt-of science!" The mayor looked respectfully at the silent box on the bar. "And this thing gets broadcasts from the fourth dimension?" "It does, Mr. Johnson! Only charlatans like those who envied Doctor Dean's magnificent accomplishments could deny that fact." The mayor put his hands in his pockets, unswiveled one hip and stared thoughtfully at the battered cabinet. "Well, let's say it picks up fourth dimensional broadcasts," he conceded. "But how could you understand what they're saying? Folks up there wouldn't talk our language." Again Harvey smashed his fist down. "Do you dare to repeat the scurvy lie that broke Dean's spirit and drove him to suicide?" Johnson recoiled. "No—no, of course not . I mean, being up here, I naturally couldn't get all the details." "Naturally," Harvey agreed, mollified. "I'm sorry I lost my temper. But it is a matter of record that the doctor proved the broadcasts emanating from the super-dimension were in English! Why should that be so difficult to believe? Is it impossible that at one time there was communication between the dimensions, that the super-beings admired our language and adopted it in all its beauty, adding to it their own hyper-scientific trimmings?" "Why, I don't know," Johnson said in confusion. "For three years, Joseph and I lost sleep and hair, trying to detect the simple key that would translate the somewhat metamorphosed broadcasts into our primitive English. It eluded us. Even the doctor failed. But that was understandable; a sensitive soul like his could stand only so much. And the combination of ridicule and failure to solve the mystery caused him to take his own life." Johnson winced. "Is that what you want to unload on me?" "For a very good reason, sir. Patience is the virtue that will be rewarded with the key to these fourth dimensional broadcasts. A man who could devote his life to improving this lonely worldlet is obviously a person with unusual patience." "Yeah," the mayor said grudgingly, "I ain't exactly flighty." "Therefore, you are the man who could unravel the problem!" Johnson asked skeptically: "How about a sample first?" Harvey turned a knob on the face of the scarred radio. After several squeals of spatial figures, a smooth voice began: "There are omnious pleajes of moby-hailegs in sonmirand which, howgraismon, are notch to be donfured miss ellasellabell in either or both hagasanipaj, by all means. This does not refly, on the brother man, nat or mizzafil saces are denuded by this ossifaligo...." Harvey switched off the set determinedly. "Wait a minute!" Johnson begged. "I almost got it then!" "I dislike being commercial," said Harvey, "but this astounding device still belongs to us. Would we not be foolish to let you discover the clue before purchasing the right to do so?" The mayor nodded indecisively, looking at the radio with agonized longing. "How much do you want?" he asked unhappily. "One thousand buckos, and no haggling. I am not in the mood." Johnson opened his mouth to argue; then, seeing Harvey's set features, paid with the worst possible grace. "Don't you think we ought to tell him about the batteries, Harv?" Joe asked. "What about the batteries?" demanded Johnson with deadly calm. "A very small matter," Harvey said airily. "You see, we have been analyzing these broadcasts for three years. In that time, of course, the batteries are bound to weaken. I estimate these should last not less than one Terrestrial month, at the very least." "What do I do then?" Harvey shrugged. "Special batteries are required, which I see Joseph has by chance brought along. For the batteries, the only ones of their kind left in the system, I ask only what they cost—one hundred and ninety-nine buckos, no more and, on the other hand, no less." Johnson was breathing hard, and his hand hovered dangerously near his gun. But he paid the amount Harvey wanted. Moreover, he actually shook hands when the two panacea purveyors collected their six-armed prize and said goodbye. Before they were outside, however, he had turned on the radio and was listening tensely to a woman's highly cultured, though rather angry voice, saying: "Oh, you hannaforge are all beasa-taga-sanimort. If you rue amount it, how do you respench a pure woman to ansver go-samak—" "I'll get it!" they heard Johnson mutter. Then the sound of giant feet crossing the barroom floor reached their ears, and a shrill question: "What's that, Papa?" "A fortune, Jed! Those fakers are damned fools, selling us a thing like—" Joe gazed at Harvey admiringly. "Another one sold? Harv, that spiel pulls them in like an ether storm!" Together with the remarkable planetoid man, they reached the ship. Above them, dark, tumbling shapes blotted out the stars and silently moved on. Joe opened the gangway door. "Come on in, pal," he said to Genius. "We're shoving off." The planetoid man grinned foolishly. "Can't go arong with you," he said with an apologetic manner. "I rike to, but pressure fratten me out if I go." "What in solar blazes are you talking about?" Harvey asked. "I grow up on pranetoid," Genius explained. "On big pranet, too much pressure for me." The two salesmen looked narrowly at each other. "Did Johnson know that when he sold you?" Joe snarled. "Oh, sure." The silly grin became wider than ever. "Peopre from Earth buy me rots of times. I never reave pranetoid, though." "Joseph," Harvey said ominously, "that slick colonist has put one over upon us. What is our customary procedure in that event?" "We tear him apart," Joe replied between his teeth. "Not Mister Johnson," advised Genius. "Have gun and badge. He shoot you first and then rock you up in prison." Harvey paused, his ominous air vanishing. "True. There is also the fact, Joseph, that when he discovers the scrambled rectifier in the radio we sold him, he will have been paid back in full for his regrettable dishonesty." Unwillingly, Joe agreed. While Genius retreated to a safe distance, they entered the ship and blasted off. Within a few minutes the automatic steering pilot had maneuvered them above the plane of the asteroid belt. "I got kind of dizzy," Joe said, "there were so many deals back and forth. How much did we make on the sucker?" "A goodly amount, I wager," Harvey responded. He took out a pencil and paper. "Medicine, 469.50; radio, 1,000; batteries, 199. Total—let's see—1668 buckos and 50 redsents. A goodly sum, as I told you." He emptied his pockets of money, spread it out on the astrogation table and began counting. Finished, he looked up, troubled. "How much did we have when we landed, Joseph?" "Exactly 1668 buckos," Joe answered promptly. "I can't understand it," said Harvey. "Instead of double our capital, we now have only 1668 buckos and 50 redsents!" Feverishly, he returned to his pencil and paper. "Drinking water, 790; battery water, free; meal, 328; planetoid man, 550. Total: 1668 buckos!" He stared at the figures. "We paid out almost as much as we took in," he said bitterly. "Despite our intensive efforts, we made the absurd sum of fifty redsents." "Why, the dirty crook!" Joe growled. But after a few moments of sad reflection, Harvey became philosophical. "Perhaps, Joseph, we are more fortunate than we realize. We were, after all, completely in Johnson's power. The more I ponder, the more I believe we were lucky to escape. And, anyhow, we did make fifty redsents on the swindler. A moral victory, my boy." Joe, who had been sunk desparingly into a chair, now stood up slowly and asked: "Remember that bottle-opener we gave him?" "Certainly," Harvey explained. "What about it?" "How much did it cost us?" Harvey's eyebrows puckered. Suddenly he started laughing. "You're right, Joseph. We paid forty-six redsents for it on Venus. So, after all that transacting of business, we made four redsents!" "Four redsents, hell!" Joe snapped. "That was the sales tax!" He glared; then a smile lifted his mouth. "You remember those yokels on Mars' Flatlands, and the way they worshipped gold?" " Goldbricks! " Harvey said succinctly. Grinning, Joe set the robot-controls for Mars.

What is the plot of the story?

1

Joe and Harvey land on Planetoid 42 and enter a bar. They see Genius, an incredible looking creature with six limbs, and immediately become interested in him. They tell the bartender, Johnson, that they’re very thirsty, so he sells them each eight glasses of water, and they guzzle them down. Harvey and Joe are horrified to find out that the water is highly expensive. Johnson explains that the water must be purified. When the pair leaves, they find a pipe in a small pond and realize that Johnson has undoubtedly swindled them. The sweet water is readily available and it is transported directly to the saloon via this pipe. Harvey and Joe head back to the bar. Joe comes down with a sudden illness, and it’s clear that this is a con the men use all the time. Johnson recognizes that Joe has asteroid fever and becomes frightened. Harvey explains that the only medication that will provide an instant cure is the one they happen to be selling: La-anago Yergis. Joe is instantly cured once Harvey pours the special liquid into his mouth. Johnson is flabbergasted and wants to purchase an entire case. While in the privacy of their ship, Joe and Harvey discuss their joint desire to purchase Genius. They believe they could make a fortune off of him if they featured him in an exhibit. Johnson accepts the fake solution and informs Harvey and Joe that his restaurant is open. After looking at the menu, the men are astounded at the low prices. However, they soon find out that they have been taken advantage of when they receive a bill for a very large sum of money. They learn that the fine print they missed on the menu explains the charge. When Joe tells Johnson they won’t pay the bill, Johnson reminds them that he is in fact the Sheriff as well as the saloon owner and the mayor. Harvey requests to purchase Genius, and Johnson agrees. In a last ditch effort to recoup some more money, Harvey brings up an invention they have on their ship that Johnson must see. Joe brings back a radio that was supposedly created by a famous doctor. It is special because it broadcasts from the fourth dimension. They convince Johnson that he is the perfect person to make sense of the garbled transmissions. Johnson pays extra for the special batteries it takes. Just as Harvey and Joe make it back to the ship with Genius, the creature informs them that he cannot leave the planet because another planet’s pressure would squish him to death. And yes, he admits, Johnson was fully aware of this fact when he sold him. When Harvey does the math involved in the various exchanges of goods, he realizes that after all that time and the several cons they engaged in, he and Joe made a measly four cents. The men take off on their ship and head to Mars.

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Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net GRIFTERS' ASTEROID By H. L. GOLD Harvey and Joe were the slickest con-men ever to gyp a space-lane sucker. Or so they thought! Angus Johnson knew differently. He charged them five buckos for a glass of water—and got it! [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories May 1943. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Characteristically, Harvey Ellsworth tried to maintain his dignity, though his parched tongue was almost hanging out. But Joe Mallon, with no dignity to maintain, lurched across the rubbish-strewn patch of land that had been termed a spaceport. When Harvey staggered pontifically into the battered metalloy saloon—the only one on Planetoid 42—his tall, gangling partner was already stumbling out, mouthing something incoherent. They met in the doorway, violently. "We're delirious!" Joe cried. "It's a mirage!" "What is?" asked Harvey through a mouthful of cotton. Joe reeled aside, and Harvey saw what had upset his partner. He stared, speechless for once. In their hectic voyages from planet to planet, the pair of panacea purveyors had encountered the usual strange life-forms. But never had they seen anything like the amazing creature in that colonial saloon. Paying no attention to them, it was carrying a case of liquor in two hands, six siphons in two others, and a broom and dustpan in the remaining pair. The bartender, a big man resembling the plumpish Harvey in build, was leaning negligently on the counter, ordering this impossible being to fill the partly-emptied bottles, squeeze fruit juice and sweep the floor, all of which the native did simultaneously. "Nonsense," Harvey croaked uncertainly. "We have seen enough queer things to know there are always more." He led the way inside. Through thirst-cracked lips he rasped: "Water—quick!" Without a word, the bartender reached under the counter, brought out two glasses of water. The interplanetary con-men drank noisily, asked for more, until they had drunk eight glasses. Meanwhile, the bartender had taken out eight jiggers and filled them with whiskey. Harvey and Joe were breathing hard from having gulped the water so fast, but they were beginning to revive. They noticed the bartender's impersonal eyes studying them shrewdly. "Strangers, eh?" he asked at last. "Solar salesmen, my colonial friend," Harvey answered in his usual lush manner. "We purvey that renowned Martian remedy, La-anago Yergis , the formula for which was recently discovered by ourselves in the ancient ruined city of La-anago. Medical science is unanimous in proclaiming this magic medicine the sole panacea in the entire history of therapeutics." "Yeah?" said the bartender disinterestedly, polishing the chaser glasses without washing them. "Where you heading?" "Out of Mars for Ganymede. Our condenser broke down, and we've gone without water for five ghastly days." "Got a mechanic around this dumping ground you call a port?" Joe asked. "We did. He came near starving and moved on to Titan. Ships don't land here unless they're in trouble." "Then where's the water lead-in? We'll fill up and push off." "Mayor takes care of that," replied the saloon owner. "If you gents're finished at the bar, your drinks'll be forty buckos." Harvey grinned puzzledly. "We didn't take any whiskey." "Might as well. Water's five buckos a glass. Liquor's free with every chaser." Harvey's eyes bulged. Joe gulped. "That—that's robbery!" the lanky man managed to get out in a thin quaver. The barkeeper shrugged. "When there ain't many customers, you gotta make more on each one. Besides—" "Besides nothing!" Joe roared, finding his voice again. "You dirty crook—robbing poor spacemen! You—" "You dirty crook!" Joe roared. "Robbing honest spacemen!" Harvey nudged him warningly. "Easy, my boy, easy." He turned to the bartender apologetically. "Don't mind my friend. His adrenal glands are sometimes overactive. You were going to say—?" The round face of the barkeeper had assumed an aggrieved expression. "Folks are always thinkin' the other feller's out to do 'em," he said, shaking his head. "Lemme explain about the water here. It's bitter as some kinds of sin before it's purified. Have to bring it in with buckets and make it sweet. That takes time and labor. Waddya think—I was chargin' feller critters for water just out of devilment? I charge because I gotta." "Friend," said Harvey, taking out a wallet and counting off eight five-bucko bills, "here is your money. What's fair is fair, and you have put a different complexion on what seemed at first to be an unconscionable interjection of a middleman between Nature and man's thirst." The saloon man removed his dirty apron and came around the bar. "If that's an apology, I accept it. Now the mayor'll discuss filling your tanks. That's me. I'm also justice of the peace, official recorder, fire chief...." "And chief of police, no doubt," said Harvey jocosely. "Nope. That's my son, Jed. Angus Johnson's my name. Folks here just call me Chief. I run this town, and run it right. How much water will you need?" Joe estimated quickly. "About seventy-five liters, if we go on half rations," he answered. He waited apprehensively. "Let's say ten buckos a liter," the mayor said. "On account of the quantity, I'm able to quote a bargain price. Shucks, boys, it hurts me more to charge for water than it does for you to pay. I just got to, that's all." The mayor gestured to the native, who shuffled out to the tanks with them. The planetoid man worked the pump while the mayor intently watched the crude level-gauge, crying "Stop!" when it registered the proper amount. Then Johnson rubbed his thumb on his index finger and wetted his lips expectantly. Harvey bravely counted off the bills. He asked: "But what are we to do about replenishing our battery fluid? Ten buckos a liter would be preposterous. We simply can't afford it." Johnson's response almost floored them. "Who said anything about charging you for battery water? You can have all you want for nothing. It's just the purified stuff that comes so high." After giving them directions that would take them to the free-water pool, the ponderous factotum of Planetoid 42 shook hands and headed back to the saloon. His six-armed assistant followed him inside. "Now do you see, my hot-tempered colleague?" said Harvey as he and Joe picked up buckets that hung on the tank. "Johnson, as I saw instantly, is the victim of a difficult environment, and must charge accordingly." "Just the same," Joe griped, "paying for water isn't something you can get used to in ten minutes." In the fragile forest, they soon came across a stream that sprang from the igneous soil and splashed into the small pond whose contents, according to the mayor, was theirs for the asking. They filled their buckets and hauled them to the ship, then returned for more. It was on the sixth trip that Joe caught a glimpse of Jupiter-shine on a bright surface off to the left. The figure, 750, with the bucko sign in front of it, was still doing acrobatics inside his skull and keeping a faint suspicion alive in him. So he called Harvey and they went to investigate. Among the skimpy ground-crawling vines, they saw a long slender mound that was unmistakably a buried pipe. "What's this doing here?" Harvey asked, puzzled. "I thought Johnson had to transport water in pails." "Wonder where it leads to," Joe said uneasily. "It leads to the saloon," said Harvey, his eyes rapidly tracing the pipe back toward the spaceport. "What I am concerned with is where it leads from ." Five minutes later, panting heavily from the unaccustomed exertion of scrambling through the tangle of planetorial undergrowth, they burst into the open—before a clear, sparkling pool. Mutely, Harvey pointed out a pipe-end jutting under the water. "I am growing suspicious," he said in a rigidly controlled voice. But Joe was already on his knees, scooping up a handful of water and tasting it. "Sweet!" he snarled. They rushed back to the first pool, where Joe again tasted a sample. His mouth went wry. "Bitter! He uses only one pool, the sweet one! The only thing that needs purifying around here is that blasted mayor's conscience." "The asteroidal Poobah has tricked us with a slick come-on," said Harvey slowly. His eyes grew cold. "Joseph, the good-natured artist in me has become a hard and merciless avenger. I shall not rest until we have had the best of this colonial con-man! Watch your cues from this point hence." Fists clenched, the two returned to the saloon. But at the door they stopped and their fists unclenched. "Thought you gents were leaving," the mayor called out, seeing them frozen in the doorway. "Glad you didn't. Now you can meet my son, Jed. Him and me are the whole Earthman population of Johnson City." "You don't need any more," said Harvey, dismayed. Johnson's eight-foot son, topped by a massive roof of sun-bleached hair and held up by a foundation that seemed immovable, had obviously been born and raised in low gravity. For any decent-sized world would have kept him down near the general dimensions of a man. He held out an acre of palm. Harvey studied it worriedly, put his own hand somewhere on it, swallowed as it closed, then breathed again when his fingers were released in five units instead of a single compressed one. "Pleased to meet you," piped a voice that had never known a dense atmosphere. The pursuit of vengeance, Harvey realized, had taken a quick and unpleasant turn. Something shrewd was called for.... "Joseph!" he exclaimed, looking at his partner in alarm. "Don't you feel well?" Even before the others could turn to him, Joe's practiced eyes were gently crossing. He sagged against the door frame, all his features drooping like a bloodhound's. "Bring him in here!" Johnson cried. "I mean, get him away! He's coming down with asteroid fever!" "Of course," replied Harvey calmly. "Any fool knows the first symptoms of the disease that once scourged the universe." "What do you mean, once ?" demanded Johnson. "I come down with it every year, and I ain't hankering to have it in an off-season. Get him out of here!" "In good time. He can't be moved immediately." "Then he'll be here for months!" Harvey helped Joe to the counter and lifted him up on it. The mayor and his gigantic offspring were cowering across the room, trying to breathe in tiny, uncontaminating gasps. "You'll find everything you want in the back room," Johnson said frantically, "sulfopyridine, mustard plasters, rubs, inhalers, suction cups—" "Relics of the past," Harvey stated. "One medication is all modern man requires to combat the dread menace, asteroid fever." "What's that?" asked the mayor without conviction. Instead of replying, Harvey hurried outside to the ungainly second-hand rocket ship in the center of the shabby spaceport. He returned within a few minutes, carrying a bottle. Joe was still stretched out on the bar, panting, his eyes slowly crossing and uncrossing. Harvey lifted the patient's head tenderly, put the bottle to his lips and tilted it until he was forced to drink. When Joe tried to pull away, Harvey was inexorable. He made his partner drink until most of the liquid was gone. Then he stepped back and waited for the inevitable result. Joe's performance was better than ever. He lay supine for several moments, his face twisted into an expression that seemed doomed to perpetual wryness. Slowly, however, he sat up and his features straightened out. "Are—are you all right?" asked the mayor anxiously. "Much better," said Joe in a weak voice. "Maybe you need another dose," Harvey suggested. Joe recoiled. "I'm fine now!" he cried, and sprang off the bar to prove it. Astonished, Johnson and his son drew closer. They searched Joe's face, and then the mayor timidly felt his pulse. "Well, I'll be hanged!" Johnson ejaculated. " La-anago Yergis never fails, my friend," Harvey explained. "By actual test, it conquers asteroid fever in from four to twenty-three minutes, depending on the severity of the attack. Luckily, we caught this one before it grew formidable." The mayor's eyes became clouded mirrors of an inward conflict. "If you don't charge too much," he said warily, "I might think of buying some." "We do not sell this unbelievable remedy," Harvey replied with dignity. "It sells itself." "'Course, I'd expect a considerable reduction if I bought a whole case," said Johnson. "That would be the smallest investment you could make, compared with the vast loss of time and strength the fever involves." "How much?" asked the mayor unhappily. "For you, since you have taken us in so hospitably, a mere five hundred buckos." Johnson did not actually stagger back, but he gave the impression of doing so. "F-four hundred," he offered. "Not a red cent less than four seventy-five," Harvey said flatly. "Make it four fifty," quavered Johnson. "I dislike haggling," said Harvey. The final price, however, was four hundred and sixty-nine buckos and fifty redsents. Magnanimously, Harvey added: "And we will include, gratis , an elegant bottle-opener, a superb product of Mercurian handicraftsmanship." Johnson stabbed out a warning finger. "No tricks now. I want a taste of that stuff. You're not switching some worthless junk on me." Harvey took a glass from the bar and poured him a generous sample. The mayor sniffed it, grimaced, then threw it down his gullet. The ensuing minute saw a grim battle between a man and his stomach, a battle which the man gradually won. "There ain't no words for that taste," he gulped when it was safe to talk again. "Medicine," Harvey propounded, "should taste like medicine." To Joe he said: "Come, my esteemed colleague. We must perform the sacred task to which we have dedicated ourselves." With Joe stumbling along behind, he left the saloon, crossed the clearing and entered the ship. As soon as they were inside, Joe dropped his murderous silence and cried: "What kind of a dirty trick was that, giving me poison instead of that snake oil?" "That was not poison," Harvey contradicted quietly. "It was La-anago Yergis extract, plus." "Plus what—arsenic?" "Now, Joseph! Consider my quandary when I came back here to manufacture our specific for all known ailments, with the intention of selling yonder asteroidal tin-horn a bill of medical goods—an entire case, mind you. Was I to mix the extract with the water for which we had been swindled to the tune of ten buckos a liter? Where would our profit have been, then? No; I had to use the bitter free water, of course." "But why use it on me?" Joe demanded furiously. Harvey looked reprovingly at his gangling partner. "Did Johnson ask to taste it, or did he not? One must look ahead, Joseph. I had to produce the same medicine that we will now manufacture. Thus, you were a guinea pig for a splendid cause." "Okay, okay," Joe said. "But you shoulda charged him more." "Joseph, I promise you that we shall get back every redsent of which that swindler cheated us, besides whatever other funds or valuables he possesses. We could not be content with less." "Well, we're starting all right," admitted Joe. "How about that thing with six arms? He looks like a valuable. Can't we grab him off?" Harvey stopped filling bottles and looked up pensively. "I have every hope of luring away the profitable monstrosity. Apparently you have also surmised the fortune we could make with him. At first I purpose to exhibit him on our interplanetary tours with our streamlined panacea; he would be a spectacular attraction for bucolic suckers. Later, a brief period of demonstrating his abilities on the audio-visiphone. Then our triumph—we shall sell him at a stupendous figure to the zoo!" Joe was still dazed by that monetary vista when he and Harvey carried the case of medicine to the saloon. The mayor had already cleared a place of honor in the cluttered back room, where he told them to put it down carefully. Then he took the elaborate bottle-opener Harvey gave him, reverently uncorked a bottle and sampled it. It must have been at least as good as the first; he gagged. "That's the stuff, all right," he said, swallowing hard. He counted out the money into Harvey's hand, at a moderate rate that precariously balanced between his pleasure at getting the fever remedy and his pain at paying for it. Then he glanced out to see the position of Jupiter, and asked: "You gents eaten yet? The restaurant's open now." Harvey and Joe looked at each other. They hadn't been thinking about food at all, but suddenly they realized that they were hungry. "It's only water we were short of," Harvey said apprehensively. "We've got rations back at the ship." " H-mph! " the mayor grunted. "Powdered concentrates. Compressed pap. Suit yourselves. We treat our stomachs better here. And you're welcome to our hospitality." "Your hospitality," said Harvey, "depends on the prices you charge." "Well, if that's what's worrying you, you can stop worrying," answered the mayor promptly. "What's more, the kind of dinner I serve here you can't get anywhere else for any price." Swiftly, Harvey conned the possibilities of being bilked again. He saw none. "Let's take a look at the menu, anyhow, Joe," he said guardedly. Johnson immediately fell into the role of "mine host." "Come right in, gents," he invited. "Right into the dining room." He seated them at a table, which a rope tied between posts made more or less private, though nobody else was in the saloon and there was little chance of company. Genius, the six-armed native, appeared from the dingy kitchen with two menus in one hand, two glasses of water in another, plus napkins, silverware, a pitcher, plates, saucers, cups, and their cocktails, which were on the house. Then he stood by for orders. Harvey and Joe studied the menu critically. The prices were phenomenally low. When they glanced up at Johnson in perplexity, he grinned, bowed and asked: "Everything satisfactory, gents?" "Quite," said Harvey. "We shall order." For an hour they were served amazing dishes, both fresh and canned, the culinary wealth of this planetoid and all the system. And the service was as extraordinary as the meal itself. With four hands, Genius played deftly upon a pair of mellow Venusian viotars , using his other two hands for waiting on the table. "We absolutely must purchase this incredible specimen," Harvey whispered excitedly when Johnson and the native were both in the kitchen, attending to the next course. "He would make any society hostess's season a riotous success, which should be worth a great sum to women like Mrs. van Schuyler-Morgan, merely for his hire." "Think of a fast one fast," Joe agreed. "You're right." "But I dislike having to revise my opinion of a man so often," complained Harvey. "I wish Johnson would stay either swindler or honest merchant. This dinner is worth as least twenty buckos, yet I estimate our check at a mere bucko twenty redsents." The mayor's appearance prevented them from continuing the discussion. "It's been a great honor, gents," he said. "Ain't often I have visitors, and I like the best, like you two gents." As if on cue, Genius came out and put the check down between Joe and Harvey. Harvey picked it up negligently, but his casual air vanished in a yelp of horror. "What the devil is this?" he shouted.—"How do you arrive at this fantastic, idiotic figure— three hundred and twenty-eight buckos !" Johnson didn't answer. Neither did Genius; he simply put on the table, not a fingerbowl, but a magnifying glass. With one of his thirty fingers he pointed politely to the bottom of the menu. Harvey focused on the microscopic print, and his face went pasty with rage. The minute note read: "Services and entertainment, 327 buckos 80 redsents." "You can go to hell!" Joe growled. "We won't pay it!" Johnson sighed ponderously. "I was afraid you'd act like that," he said with regret. He pulled a tin badge out of his rear pocket, pinned it on his vest, and twisted his holstered gun into view. "Afraid I'll have to ask the sheriff to take over." Johnson, the "sheriff," collected the money, and Johnson, the "restaurateur," pocketed it. Meanwhile, Harvey tipped Joe the sign to remain calm. "My friend," he said to the mayor, and his tones took on a schoolmasterish severity, "your long absence from Earth has perhaps made you forget those elements of human wisdom that have entered the folk-lore of your native planet. Such as, for example: 'It is folly to kill a goose that lays golden eggs,' and 'Penny wise is pound foolish.'" "I don't get the connection," objected Johnson. "Well, by obliging us to pay such a high price for your dinner, you put out of your reach the chance of profiting from a really substantial deal. My partner and I were prepared to make you a sizable offer for the peculiar creature you call Genius. But by reducing our funds the way you have—" "Who said I wanted to sell him?" the mayor interrupted. He rubbed his fingers together and asked disinterestedly: "What were you going to offer, anyhow?" "It doesn't matter any longer," Harvey said with elaborate carelessness. "Perhaps you wouldn't have accepted it, anyway." "That's right," Johnson came back emphatically. "But what would your offer have been which I would have turned down?" "Which one? The one we were going to make, or the one we can make now?" "Either one. It don't make no difference. Genius is too valuable to sell." "Oh, come now, Mr. Johnson. Don't tell me no amount of money would tempt you!" "Nope. But how much did you say?" "Ah, then you will consider releasing Genius!" "Well, I'll tell you something," said the mayor confidentially. "When you've got one thing, you've got one thing. But when you've got money, it's the same as having a lot of things. Because, if you've got money, you can buy this and that and this and that and—" "This and that," concluded Joe. "We'll give you five hundred buckos." "Now, gents!" Johnson remonstrated. "Why, six hundred would hardly—" "You haven't left us much money," Harvey put in. The mayor frowned. "All right, we'll split the difference. Make it five-fifty." Harvey was quick to pay out, for this was a genuine windfall. Then he stood up and admired the astonishing possession he had so inexpensively acquired. "I really hate to deprive you of this unique creature," he said to Johnson. "I should imagine you will be rather lonely, with only your filial mammoth to keep you company." "I sure will," Johnson confessed glumly. "I got pretty attached to Genius, and I'm going to miss him something awful." Harvey forcibly removed his eyes from the native, who was clearing off the table almost all at once. "My friend," he said, "we take your only solace, it is true, but in his place we can offer something no less amazing and instructive." The mayor's hand went protectively to his pocket. "What is it?" he asked with the suspicion of a man who has seen human nature at its worst and expects nothing better. "Joseph, get our most prized belonging from the communications room of the ship," Harvey instructed. To Johnson he explained: "You must see the wondrous instrument before its value can be appreciated. My partner will soon have it here for your astonishment." Joe's face grew as glum as Johnson's had been. "Aw, Harv," he protested, "do we have to sell it? And right when I thought we were getting the key!" "We must not be selfish, my boy," Harvey said nobly. "We have had our chance; now we must relinquish Fate to the hands of a man who might have more success than we. Go, Joseph. Bring it here." Unwillingly, Joe turned and shuffled out. On a larger and heavier world than Planetoid 42, Johnson's curiosity would probably have had weight and mass. He was bursting with questions, but he was obviously afraid they would cost him money. For his part, Harvey allowed that curiosity to grow like a Venusian amoeba until Joe came in, lugging a radio. "Is that what you were talking about?" the mayor snorted. "What makes you think I want a radio? I came here to get away from singers and political speech-makers." "Do not jump to hasty conclusions," Harvey cautioned. "Another word, and I shall refuse you the greatest opportunity any man has ever had, with the sole exceptions of Joseph, myself and the unfortunate inventor of this absolutely awe-inspiring device." "I ain't in the market for a radio," Johnson said stubbornly. Harvey nodded in relief. "We have attempted to repay our host, Joseph. He has spurned our generosity. We have now the chance to continue our study, which I am positive will soon reward us with the key to an enormous fortune." "Well, that's no plating off our bow," Joe grunted. "I'm glad he did turn it down. I hated to give it up after working on it for three whole years." He picked up the radio and began walking toward the door. "Now, hold on!" the mayor cried. "I ain't saying I'll buy, but what is it I'm turning down?" Joe returned and set the instrument down on the bar. His face sorrowful, Harvey fondly stroked the scarred plasticoid cabinet. "To make a long story, Mr. Johnson," he said, "Joseph and I were among the chosen few who knew the famous Doctor Dean intimately. Just before his tragic death, you will recall, Dean allegedly went insane." He banged his fist on the bar. "I have said it before, and I repeat again, that was a malicious lie, spread by the doctor's enemies to discredit his greatest invention—this fourth dimensional radio!" "This what?" Johnson blurted out. "In simple terms," clarified Harvey, "the ingenious doctor discovered that the yawning chasm between the dimensions could be bridged by energy of all quanta. There has never been any question that the inhabitants of the super-dimension would be far more civilized than ourselves. Consequently, the man who could tap their knowledge would find himself in possession of a powerful, undreamt-of science!" The mayor looked respectfully at the silent box on the bar. "And this thing gets broadcasts from the fourth dimension?" "It does, Mr. Johnson! Only charlatans like those who envied Doctor Dean's magnificent accomplishments could deny that fact." The mayor put his hands in his pockets, unswiveled one hip and stared thoughtfully at the battered cabinet. "Well, let's say it picks up fourth dimensional broadcasts," he conceded. "But how could you understand what they're saying? Folks up there wouldn't talk our language." Again Harvey smashed his fist down. "Do you dare to repeat the scurvy lie that broke Dean's spirit and drove him to suicide?" Johnson recoiled. "No—no, of course not . I mean, being up here, I naturally couldn't get all the details." "Naturally," Harvey agreed, mollified. "I'm sorry I lost my temper. But it is a matter of record that the doctor proved the broadcasts emanating from the super-dimension were in English! Why should that be so difficult to believe? Is it impossible that at one time there was communication between the dimensions, that the super-beings admired our language and adopted it in all its beauty, adding to it their own hyper-scientific trimmings?" "Why, I don't know," Johnson said in confusion. "For three years, Joseph and I lost sleep and hair, trying to detect the simple key that would translate the somewhat metamorphosed broadcasts into our primitive English. It eluded us. Even the doctor failed. But that was understandable; a sensitive soul like his could stand only so much. And the combination of ridicule and failure to solve the mystery caused him to take his own life." Johnson winced. "Is that what you want to unload on me?" "For a very good reason, sir. Patience is the virtue that will be rewarded with the key to these fourth dimensional broadcasts. A man who could devote his life to improving this lonely worldlet is obviously a person with unusual patience." "Yeah," the mayor said grudgingly, "I ain't exactly flighty." "Therefore, you are the man who could unravel the problem!" Johnson asked skeptically: "How about a sample first?" Harvey turned a knob on the face of the scarred radio. After several squeals of spatial figures, a smooth voice began: "There are omnious pleajes of moby-hailegs in sonmirand which, howgraismon, are notch to be donfured miss ellasellabell in either or both hagasanipaj, by all means. This does not refly, on the brother man, nat or mizzafil saces are denuded by this ossifaligo...." Harvey switched off the set determinedly. "Wait a minute!" Johnson begged. "I almost got it then!" "I dislike being commercial," said Harvey, "but this astounding device still belongs to us. Would we not be foolish to let you discover the clue before purchasing the right to do so?" The mayor nodded indecisively, looking at the radio with agonized longing. "How much do you want?" he asked unhappily. "One thousand buckos, and no haggling. I am not in the mood." Johnson opened his mouth to argue; then, seeing Harvey's set features, paid with the worst possible grace. "Don't you think we ought to tell him about the batteries, Harv?" Joe asked. "What about the batteries?" demanded Johnson with deadly calm. "A very small matter," Harvey said airily. "You see, we have been analyzing these broadcasts for three years. In that time, of course, the batteries are bound to weaken. I estimate these should last not less than one Terrestrial month, at the very least." "What do I do then?" Harvey shrugged. "Special batteries are required, which I see Joseph has by chance brought along. For the batteries, the only ones of their kind left in the system, I ask only what they cost—one hundred and ninety-nine buckos, no more and, on the other hand, no less." Johnson was breathing hard, and his hand hovered dangerously near his gun. But he paid the amount Harvey wanted. Moreover, he actually shook hands when the two panacea purveyors collected their six-armed prize and said goodbye. Before they were outside, however, he had turned on the radio and was listening tensely to a woman's highly cultured, though rather angry voice, saying: "Oh, you hannaforge are all beasa-taga-sanimort. If you rue amount it, how do you respench a pure woman to ansver go-samak—" "I'll get it!" they heard Johnson mutter. Then the sound of giant feet crossing the barroom floor reached their ears, and a shrill question: "What's that, Papa?" "A fortune, Jed! Those fakers are damned fools, selling us a thing like—" Joe gazed at Harvey admiringly. "Another one sold? Harv, that spiel pulls them in like an ether storm!" Together with the remarkable planetoid man, they reached the ship. Above them, dark, tumbling shapes blotted out the stars and silently moved on. Joe opened the gangway door. "Come on in, pal," he said to Genius. "We're shoving off." The planetoid man grinned foolishly. "Can't go arong with you," he said with an apologetic manner. "I rike to, but pressure fratten me out if I go." "What in solar blazes are you talking about?" Harvey asked. "I grow up on pranetoid," Genius explained. "On big pranet, too much pressure for me." The two salesmen looked narrowly at each other. "Did Johnson know that when he sold you?" Joe snarled. "Oh, sure." The silly grin became wider than ever. "Peopre from Earth buy me rots of times. I never reave pranetoid, though." "Joseph," Harvey said ominously, "that slick colonist has put one over upon us. What is our customary procedure in that event?" "We tear him apart," Joe replied between his teeth. "Not Mister Johnson," advised Genius. "Have gun and badge. He shoot you first and then rock you up in prison." Harvey paused, his ominous air vanishing. "True. There is also the fact, Joseph, that when he discovers the scrambled rectifier in the radio we sold him, he will have been paid back in full for his regrettable dishonesty." Unwillingly, Joe agreed. While Genius retreated to a safe distance, they entered the ship and blasted off. Within a few minutes the automatic steering pilot had maneuvered them above the plane of the asteroid belt. "I got kind of dizzy," Joe said, "there were so many deals back and forth. How much did we make on the sucker?" "A goodly amount, I wager," Harvey responded. He took out a pencil and paper. "Medicine, 469.50; radio, 1,000; batteries, 199. Total—let's see—1668 buckos and 50 redsents. A goodly sum, as I told you." He emptied his pockets of money, spread it out on the astrogation table and began counting. Finished, he looked up, troubled. "How much did we have when we landed, Joseph?" "Exactly 1668 buckos," Joe answered promptly. "I can't understand it," said Harvey. "Instead of double our capital, we now have only 1668 buckos and 50 redsents!" Feverishly, he returned to his pencil and paper. "Drinking water, 790; battery water, free; meal, 328; planetoid man, 550. Total: 1668 buckos!" He stared at the figures. "We paid out almost as much as we took in," he said bitterly. "Despite our intensive efforts, we made the absurd sum of fifty redsents." "Why, the dirty crook!" Joe growled. But after a few moments of sad reflection, Harvey became philosophical. "Perhaps, Joseph, we are more fortunate than we realize. We were, after all, completely in Johnson's power. The more I ponder, the more I believe we were lucky to escape. And, anyhow, we did make fifty redsents on the swindler. A moral victory, my boy." Joe, who had been sunk desparingly into a chair, now stood up slowly and asked: "Remember that bottle-opener we gave him?" "Certainly," Harvey explained. "What about it?" "How much did it cost us?" Harvey's eyebrows puckered. Suddenly he started laughing. "You're right, Joseph. We paid forty-six redsents for it on Venus. So, after all that transacting of business, we made four redsents!" "Four redsents, hell!" Joe snapped. "That was the sales tax!" He glared; then a smile lifted his mouth. "You remember those yokels on Mars' Flatlands, and the way they worshipped gold?" " Goldbricks! " Harvey said succinctly. Grinning, Joe set the robot-controls for Mars.

What is the plot of the story?

5

Harvey and Joe are interplanetary conmen. They sell fraudulent snake-oil to unsuspecting marks. They arrive on Planetoid 42, a nearly uninhabited asteroid, with a desperate need for water. They come upon the only habitation on the planet and receive water that they are grossly overcharged for. They deal with Johnson, the lone authority on the planet, who is a grifter himself. They duo and Johnson proceed to swindle each other out of money using various schemes and deceptions. As they leave the planet Harvey and Joe realize that they have broke completely even, losing as much money as they gained.

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Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net GRIFTERS' ASTEROID By H. L. GOLD Harvey and Joe were the slickest con-men ever to gyp a space-lane sucker. Or so they thought! Angus Johnson knew differently. He charged them five buckos for a glass of water—and got it! [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories May 1943. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Characteristically, Harvey Ellsworth tried to maintain his dignity, though his parched tongue was almost hanging out. But Joe Mallon, with no dignity to maintain, lurched across the rubbish-strewn patch of land that had been termed a spaceport. When Harvey staggered pontifically into the battered metalloy saloon—the only one on Planetoid 42—his tall, gangling partner was already stumbling out, mouthing something incoherent. They met in the doorway, violently. "We're delirious!" Joe cried. "It's a mirage!" "What is?" asked Harvey through a mouthful of cotton. Joe reeled aside, and Harvey saw what had upset his partner. He stared, speechless for once. In their hectic voyages from planet to planet, the pair of panacea purveyors had encountered the usual strange life-forms. But never had they seen anything like the amazing creature in that colonial saloon. Paying no attention to them, it was carrying a case of liquor in two hands, six siphons in two others, and a broom and dustpan in the remaining pair. The bartender, a big man resembling the plumpish Harvey in build, was leaning negligently on the counter, ordering this impossible being to fill the partly-emptied bottles, squeeze fruit juice and sweep the floor, all of which the native did simultaneously. "Nonsense," Harvey croaked uncertainly. "We have seen enough queer things to know there are always more." He led the way inside. Through thirst-cracked lips he rasped: "Water—quick!" Without a word, the bartender reached under the counter, brought out two glasses of water. The interplanetary con-men drank noisily, asked for more, until they had drunk eight glasses. Meanwhile, the bartender had taken out eight jiggers and filled them with whiskey. Harvey and Joe were breathing hard from having gulped the water so fast, but they were beginning to revive. They noticed the bartender's impersonal eyes studying them shrewdly. "Strangers, eh?" he asked at last. "Solar salesmen, my colonial friend," Harvey answered in his usual lush manner. "We purvey that renowned Martian remedy, La-anago Yergis , the formula for which was recently discovered by ourselves in the ancient ruined city of La-anago. Medical science is unanimous in proclaiming this magic medicine the sole panacea in the entire history of therapeutics." "Yeah?" said the bartender disinterestedly, polishing the chaser glasses without washing them. "Where you heading?" "Out of Mars for Ganymede. Our condenser broke down, and we've gone without water for five ghastly days." "Got a mechanic around this dumping ground you call a port?" Joe asked. "We did. He came near starving and moved on to Titan. Ships don't land here unless they're in trouble." "Then where's the water lead-in? We'll fill up and push off." "Mayor takes care of that," replied the saloon owner. "If you gents're finished at the bar, your drinks'll be forty buckos." Harvey grinned puzzledly. "We didn't take any whiskey." "Might as well. Water's five buckos a glass. Liquor's free with every chaser." Harvey's eyes bulged. Joe gulped. "That—that's robbery!" the lanky man managed to get out in a thin quaver. The barkeeper shrugged. "When there ain't many customers, you gotta make more on each one. Besides—" "Besides nothing!" Joe roared, finding his voice again. "You dirty crook—robbing poor spacemen! You—" "You dirty crook!" Joe roared. "Robbing honest spacemen!" Harvey nudged him warningly. "Easy, my boy, easy." He turned to the bartender apologetically. "Don't mind my friend. His adrenal glands are sometimes overactive. You were going to say—?" The round face of the barkeeper had assumed an aggrieved expression. "Folks are always thinkin' the other feller's out to do 'em," he said, shaking his head. "Lemme explain about the water here. It's bitter as some kinds of sin before it's purified. Have to bring it in with buckets and make it sweet. That takes time and labor. Waddya think—I was chargin' feller critters for water just out of devilment? I charge because I gotta." "Friend," said Harvey, taking out a wallet and counting off eight five-bucko bills, "here is your money. What's fair is fair, and you have put a different complexion on what seemed at first to be an unconscionable interjection of a middleman between Nature and man's thirst." The saloon man removed his dirty apron and came around the bar. "If that's an apology, I accept it. Now the mayor'll discuss filling your tanks. That's me. I'm also justice of the peace, official recorder, fire chief...." "And chief of police, no doubt," said Harvey jocosely. "Nope. That's my son, Jed. Angus Johnson's my name. Folks here just call me Chief. I run this town, and run it right. How much water will you need?" Joe estimated quickly. "About seventy-five liters, if we go on half rations," he answered. He waited apprehensively. "Let's say ten buckos a liter," the mayor said. "On account of the quantity, I'm able to quote a bargain price. Shucks, boys, it hurts me more to charge for water than it does for you to pay. I just got to, that's all." The mayor gestured to the native, who shuffled out to the tanks with them. The planetoid man worked the pump while the mayor intently watched the crude level-gauge, crying "Stop!" when it registered the proper amount. Then Johnson rubbed his thumb on his index finger and wetted his lips expectantly. Harvey bravely counted off the bills. He asked: "But what are we to do about replenishing our battery fluid? Ten buckos a liter would be preposterous. We simply can't afford it." Johnson's response almost floored them. "Who said anything about charging you for battery water? You can have all you want for nothing. It's just the purified stuff that comes so high." After giving them directions that would take them to the free-water pool, the ponderous factotum of Planetoid 42 shook hands and headed back to the saloon. His six-armed assistant followed him inside. "Now do you see, my hot-tempered colleague?" said Harvey as he and Joe picked up buckets that hung on the tank. "Johnson, as I saw instantly, is the victim of a difficult environment, and must charge accordingly." "Just the same," Joe griped, "paying for water isn't something you can get used to in ten minutes." In the fragile forest, they soon came across a stream that sprang from the igneous soil and splashed into the small pond whose contents, according to the mayor, was theirs for the asking. They filled their buckets and hauled them to the ship, then returned for more. It was on the sixth trip that Joe caught a glimpse of Jupiter-shine on a bright surface off to the left. The figure, 750, with the bucko sign in front of it, was still doing acrobatics inside his skull and keeping a faint suspicion alive in him. So he called Harvey and they went to investigate. Among the skimpy ground-crawling vines, they saw a long slender mound that was unmistakably a buried pipe. "What's this doing here?" Harvey asked, puzzled. "I thought Johnson had to transport water in pails." "Wonder where it leads to," Joe said uneasily. "It leads to the saloon," said Harvey, his eyes rapidly tracing the pipe back toward the spaceport. "What I am concerned with is where it leads from ." Five minutes later, panting heavily from the unaccustomed exertion of scrambling through the tangle of planetorial undergrowth, they burst into the open—before a clear, sparkling pool. Mutely, Harvey pointed out a pipe-end jutting under the water. "I am growing suspicious," he said in a rigidly controlled voice. But Joe was already on his knees, scooping up a handful of water and tasting it. "Sweet!" he snarled. They rushed back to the first pool, where Joe again tasted a sample. His mouth went wry. "Bitter! He uses only one pool, the sweet one! The only thing that needs purifying around here is that blasted mayor's conscience." "The asteroidal Poobah has tricked us with a slick come-on," said Harvey slowly. His eyes grew cold. "Joseph, the good-natured artist in me has become a hard and merciless avenger. I shall not rest until we have had the best of this colonial con-man! Watch your cues from this point hence." Fists clenched, the two returned to the saloon. But at the door they stopped and their fists unclenched. "Thought you gents were leaving," the mayor called out, seeing them frozen in the doorway. "Glad you didn't. Now you can meet my son, Jed. Him and me are the whole Earthman population of Johnson City." "You don't need any more," said Harvey, dismayed. Johnson's eight-foot son, topped by a massive roof of sun-bleached hair and held up by a foundation that seemed immovable, had obviously been born and raised in low gravity. For any decent-sized world would have kept him down near the general dimensions of a man. He held out an acre of palm. Harvey studied it worriedly, put his own hand somewhere on it, swallowed as it closed, then breathed again when his fingers were released in five units instead of a single compressed one. "Pleased to meet you," piped a voice that had never known a dense atmosphere. The pursuit of vengeance, Harvey realized, had taken a quick and unpleasant turn. Something shrewd was called for.... "Joseph!" he exclaimed, looking at his partner in alarm. "Don't you feel well?" Even before the others could turn to him, Joe's practiced eyes were gently crossing. He sagged against the door frame, all his features drooping like a bloodhound's. "Bring him in here!" Johnson cried. "I mean, get him away! He's coming down with asteroid fever!" "Of course," replied Harvey calmly. "Any fool knows the first symptoms of the disease that once scourged the universe." "What do you mean, once ?" demanded Johnson. "I come down with it every year, and I ain't hankering to have it in an off-season. Get him out of here!" "In good time. He can't be moved immediately." "Then he'll be here for months!" Harvey helped Joe to the counter and lifted him up on it. The mayor and his gigantic offspring were cowering across the room, trying to breathe in tiny, uncontaminating gasps. "You'll find everything you want in the back room," Johnson said frantically, "sulfopyridine, mustard plasters, rubs, inhalers, suction cups—" "Relics of the past," Harvey stated. "One medication is all modern man requires to combat the dread menace, asteroid fever." "What's that?" asked the mayor without conviction. Instead of replying, Harvey hurried outside to the ungainly second-hand rocket ship in the center of the shabby spaceport. He returned within a few minutes, carrying a bottle. Joe was still stretched out on the bar, panting, his eyes slowly crossing and uncrossing. Harvey lifted the patient's head tenderly, put the bottle to his lips and tilted it until he was forced to drink. When Joe tried to pull away, Harvey was inexorable. He made his partner drink until most of the liquid was gone. Then he stepped back and waited for the inevitable result. Joe's performance was better than ever. He lay supine for several moments, his face twisted into an expression that seemed doomed to perpetual wryness. Slowly, however, he sat up and his features straightened out. "Are—are you all right?" asked the mayor anxiously. "Much better," said Joe in a weak voice. "Maybe you need another dose," Harvey suggested. Joe recoiled. "I'm fine now!" he cried, and sprang off the bar to prove it. Astonished, Johnson and his son drew closer. They searched Joe's face, and then the mayor timidly felt his pulse. "Well, I'll be hanged!" Johnson ejaculated. " La-anago Yergis never fails, my friend," Harvey explained. "By actual test, it conquers asteroid fever in from four to twenty-three minutes, depending on the severity of the attack. Luckily, we caught this one before it grew formidable." The mayor's eyes became clouded mirrors of an inward conflict. "If you don't charge too much," he said warily, "I might think of buying some." "We do not sell this unbelievable remedy," Harvey replied with dignity. "It sells itself." "'Course, I'd expect a considerable reduction if I bought a whole case," said Johnson. "That would be the smallest investment you could make, compared with the vast loss of time and strength the fever involves." "How much?" asked the mayor unhappily. "For you, since you have taken us in so hospitably, a mere five hundred buckos." Johnson did not actually stagger back, but he gave the impression of doing so. "F-four hundred," he offered. "Not a red cent less than four seventy-five," Harvey said flatly. "Make it four fifty," quavered Johnson. "I dislike haggling," said Harvey. The final price, however, was four hundred and sixty-nine buckos and fifty redsents. Magnanimously, Harvey added: "And we will include, gratis , an elegant bottle-opener, a superb product of Mercurian handicraftsmanship." Johnson stabbed out a warning finger. "No tricks now. I want a taste of that stuff. You're not switching some worthless junk on me." Harvey took a glass from the bar and poured him a generous sample. The mayor sniffed it, grimaced, then threw it down his gullet. The ensuing minute saw a grim battle between a man and his stomach, a battle which the man gradually won. "There ain't no words for that taste," he gulped when it was safe to talk again. "Medicine," Harvey propounded, "should taste like medicine." To Joe he said: "Come, my esteemed colleague. We must perform the sacred task to which we have dedicated ourselves." With Joe stumbling along behind, he left the saloon, crossed the clearing and entered the ship. As soon as they were inside, Joe dropped his murderous silence and cried: "What kind of a dirty trick was that, giving me poison instead of that snake oil?" "That was not poison," Harvey contradicted quietly. "It was La-anago Yergis extract, plus." "Plus what—arsenic?" "Now, Joseph! Consider my quandary when I came back here to manufacture our specific for all known ailments, with the intention of selling yonder asteroidal tin-horn a bill of medical goods—an entire case, mind you. Was I to mix the extract with the water for which we had been swindled to the tune of ten buckos a liter? Where would our profit have been, then? No; I had to use the bitter free water, of course." "But why use it on me?" Joe demanded furiously. Harvey looked reprovingly at his gangling partner. "Did Johnson ask to taste it, or did he not? One must look ahead, Joseph. I had to produce the same medicine that we will now manufacture. Thus, you were a guinea pig for a splendid cause." "Okay, okay," Joe said. "But you shoulda charged him more." "Joseph, I promise you that we shall get back every redsent of which that swindler cheated us, besides whatever other funds or valuables he possesses. We could not be content with less." "Well, we're starting all right," admitted Joe. "How about that thing with six arms? He looks like a valuable. Can't we grab him off?" Harvey stopped filling bottles and looked up pensively. "I have every hope of luring away the profitable monstrosity. Apparently you have also surmised the fortune we could make with him. At first I purpose to exhibit him on our interplanetary tours with our streamlined panacea; he would be a spectacular attraction for bucolic suckers. Later, a brief period of demonstrating his abilities on the audio-visiphone. Then our triumph—we shall sell him at a stupendous figure to the zoo!" Joe was still dazed by that monetary vista when he and Harvey carried the case of medicine to the saloon. The mayor had already cleared a place of honor in the cluttered back room, where he told them to put it down carefully. Then he took the elaborate bottle-opener Harvey gave him, reverently uncorked a bottle and sampled it. It must have been at least as good as the first; he gagged. "That's the stuff, all right," he said, swallowing hard. He counted out the money into Harvey's hand, at a moderate rate that precariously balanced between his pleasure at getting the fever remedy and his pain at paying for it. Then he glanced out to see the position of Jupiter, and asked: "You gents eaten yet? The restaurant's open now." Harvey and Joe looked at each other. They hadn't been thinking about food at all, but suddenly they realized that they were hungry. "It's only water we were short of," Harvey said apprehensively. "We've got rations back at the ship." " H-mph! " the mayor grunted. "Powdered concentrates. Compressed pap. Suit yourselves. We treat our stomachs better here. And you're welcome to our hospitality." "Your hospitality," said Harvey, "depends on the prices you charge." "Well, if that's what's worrying you, you can stop worrying," answered the mayor promptly. "What's more, the kind of dinner I serve here you can't get anywhere else for any price." Swiftly, Harvey conned the possibilities of being bilked again. He saw none. "Let's take a look at the menu, anyhow, Joe," he said guardedly. Johnson immediately fell into the role of "mine host." "Come right in, gents," he invited. "Right into the dining room." He seated them at a table, which a rope tied between posts made more or less private, though nobody else was in the saloon and there was little chance of company. Genius, the six-armed native, appeared from the dingy kitchen with two menus in one hand, two glasses of water in another, plus napkins, silverware, a pitcher, plates, saucers, cups, and their cocktails, which were on the house. Then he stood by for orders. Harvey and Joe studied the menu critically. The prices were phenomenally low. When they glanced up at Johnson in perplexity, he grinned, bowed and asked: "Everything satisfactory, gents?" "Quite," said Harvey. "We shall order." For an hour they were served amazing dishes, both fresh and canned, the culinary wealth of this planetoid and all the system. And the service was as extraordinary as the meal itself. With four hands, Genius played deftly upon a pair of mellow Venusian viotars , using his other two hands for waiting on the table. "We absolutely must purchase this incredible specimen," Harvey whispered excitedly when Johnson and the native were both in the kitchen, attending to the next course. "He would make any society hostess's season a riotous success, which should be worth a great sum to women like Mrs. van Schuyler-Morgan, merely for his hire." "Think of a fast one fast," Joe agreed. "You're right." "But I dislike having to revise my opinion of a man so often," complained Harvey. "I wish Johnson would stay either swindler or honest merchant. This dinner is worth as least twenty buckos, yet I estimate our check at a mere bucko twenty redsents." The mayor's appearance prevented them from continuing the discussion. "It's been a great honor, gents," he said. "Ain't often I have visitors, and I like the best, like you two gents." As if on cue, Genius came out and put the check down between Joe and Harvey. Harvey picked it up negligently, but his casual air vanished in a yelp of horror. "What the devil is this?" he shouted.—"How do you arrive at this fantastic, idiotic figure— three hundred and twenty-eight buckos !" Johnson didn't answer. Neither did Genius; he simply put on the table, not a fingerbowl, but a magnifying glass. With one of his thirty fingers he pointed politely to the bottom of the menu. Harvey focused on the microscopic print, and his face went pasty with rage. The minute note read: "Services and entertainment, 327 buckos 80 redsents." "You can go to hell!" Joe growled. "We won't pay it!" Johnson sighed ponderously. "I was afraid you'd act like that," he said with regret. He pulled a tin badge out of his rear pocket, pinned it on his vest, and twisted his holstered gun into view. "Afraid I'll have to ask the sheriff to take over." Johnson, the "sheriff," collected the money, and Johnson, the "restaurateur," pocketed it. Meanwhile, Harvey tipped Joe the sign to remain calm. "My friend," he said to the mayor, and his tones took on a schoolmasterish severity, "your long absence from Earth has perhaps made you forget those elements of human wisdom that have entered the folk-lore of your native planet. Such as, for example: 'It is folly to kill a goose that lays golden eggs,' and 'Penny wise is pound foolish.'" "I don't get the connection," objected Johnson. "Well, by obliging us to pay such a high price for your dinner, you put out of your reach the chance of profiting from a really substantial deal. My partner and I were prepared to make you a sizable offer for the peculiar creature you call Genius. But by reducing our funds the way you have—" "Who said I wanted to sell him?" the mayor interrupted. He rubbed his fingers together and asked disinterestedly: "What were you going to offer, anyhow?" "It doesn't matter any longer," Harvey said with elaborate carelessness. "Perhaps you wouldn't have accepted it, anyway." "That's right," Johnson came back emphatically. "But what would your offer have been which I would have turned down?" "Which one? The one we were going to make, or the one we can make now?" "Either one. It don't make no difference. Genius is too valuable to sell." "Oh, come now, Mr. Johnson. Don't tell me no amount of money would tempt you!" "Nope. But how much did you say?" "Ah, then you will consider releasing Genius!" "Well, I'll tell you something," said the mayor confidentially. "When you've got one thing, you've got one thing. But when you've got money, it's the same as having a lot of things. Because, if you've got money, you can buy this and that and this and that and—" "This and that," concluded Joe. "We'll give you five hundred buckos." "Now, gents!" Johnson remonstrated. "Why, six hundred would hardly—" "You haven't left us much money," Harvey put in. The mayor frowned. "All right, we'll split the difference. Make it five-fifty." Harvey was quick to pay out, for this was a genuine windfall. Then he stood up and admired the astonishing possession he had so inexpensively acquired. "I really hate to deprive you of this unique creature," he said to Johnson. "I should imagine you will be rather lonely, with only your filial mammoth to keep you company." "I sure will," Johnson confessed glumly. "I got pretty attached to Genius, and I'm going to miss him something awful." Harvey forcibly removed his eyes from the native, who was clearing off the table almost all at once. "My friend," he said, "we take your only solace, it is true, but in his place we can offer something no less amazing and instructive." The mayor's hand went protectively to his pocket. "What is it?" he asked with the suspicion of a man who has seen human nature at its worst and expects nothing better. "Joseph, get our most prized belonging from the communications room of the ship," Harvey instructed. To Johnson he explained: "You must see the wondrous instrument before its value can be appreciated. My partner will soon have it here for your astonishment." Joe's face grew as glum as Johnson's had been. "Aw, Harv," he protested, "do we have to sell it? And right when I thought we were getting the key!" "We must not be selfish, my boy," Harvey said nobly. "We have had our chance; now we must relinquish Fate to the hands of a man who might have more success than we. Go, Joseph. Bring it here." Unwillingly, Joe turned and shuffled out. On a larger and heavier world than Planetoid 42, Johnson's curiosity would probably have had weight and mass. He was bursting with questions, but he was obviously afraid they would cost him money. For his part, Harvey allowed that curiosity to grow like a Venusian amoeba until Joe came in, lugging a radio. "Is that what you were talking about?" the mayor snorted. "What makes you think I want a radio? I came here to get away from singers and political speech-makers." "Do not jump to hasty conclusions," Harvey cautioned. "Another word, and I shall refuse you the greatest opportunity any man has ever had, with the sole exceptions of Joseph, myself and the unfortunate inventor of this absolutely awe-inspiring device." "I ain't in the market for a radio," Johnson said stubbornly. Harvey nodded in relief. "We have attempted to repay our host, Joseph. He has spurned our generosity. We have now the chance to continue our study, which I am positive will soon reward us with the key to an enormous fortune." "Well, that's no plating off our bow," Joe grunted. "I'm glad he did turn it down. I hated to give it up after working on it for three whole years." He picked up the radio and began walking toward the door. "Now, hold on!" the mayor cried. "I ain't saying I'll buy, but what is it I'm turning down?" Joe returned and set the instrument down on the bar. His face sorrowful, Harvey fondly stroked the scarred plasticoid cabinet. "To make a long story, Mr. Johnson," he said, "Joseph and I were among the chosen few who knew the famous Doctor Dean intimately. Just before his tragic death, you will recall, Dean allegedly went insane." He banged his fist on the bar. "I have said it before, and I repeat again, that was a malicious lie, spread by the doctor's enemies to discredit his greatest invention—this fourth dimensional radio!" "This what?" Johnson blurted out. "In simple terms," clarified Harvey, "the ingenious doctor discovered that the yawning chasm between the dimensions could be bridged by energy of all quanta. There has never been any question that the inhabitants of the super-dimension would be far more civilized than ourselves. Consequently, the man who could tap their knowledge would find himself in possession of a powerful, undreamt-of science!" The mayor looked respectfully at the silent box on the bar. "And this thing gets broadcasts from the fourth dimension?" "It does, Mr. Johnson! Only charlatans like those who envied Doctor Dean's magnificent accomplishments could deny that fact." The mayor put his hands in his pockets, unswiveled one hip and stared thoughtfully at the battered cabinet. "Well, let's say it picks up fourth dimensional broadcasts," he conceded. "But how could you understand what they're saying? Folks up there wouldn't talk our language." Again Harvey smashed his fist down. "Do you dare to repeat the scurvy lie that broke Dean's spirit and drove him to suicide?" Johnson recoiled. "No—no, of course not . I mean, being up here, I naturally couldn't get all the details." "Naturally," Harvey agreed, mollified. "I'm sorry I lost my temper. But it is a matter of record that the doctor proved the broadcasts emanating from the super-dimension were in English! Why should that be so difficult to believe? Is it impossible that at one time there was communication between the dimensions, that the super-beings admired our language and adopted it in all its beauty, adding to it their own hyper-scientific trimmings?" "Why, I don't know," Johnson said in confusion. "For three years, Joseph and I lost sleep and hair, trying to detect the simple key that would translate the somewhat metamorphosed broadcasts into our primitive English. It eluded us. Even the doctor failed. But that was understandable; a sensitive soul like his could stand only so much. And the combination of ridicule and failure to solve the mystery caused him to take his own life." Johnson winced. "Is that what you want to unload on me?" "For a very good reason, sir. Patience is the virtue that will be rewarded with the key to these fourth dimensional broadcasts. A man who could devote his life to improving this lonely worldlet is obviously a person with unusual patience." "Yeah," the mayor said grudgingly, "I ain't exactly flighty." "Therefore, you are the man who could unravel the problem!" Johnson asked skeptically: "How about a sample first?" Harvey turned a knob on the face of the scarred radio. After several squeals of spatial figures, a smooth voice began: "There are omnious pleajes of moby-hailegs in sonmirand which, howgraismon, are notch to be donfured miss ellasellabell in either or both hagasanipaj, by all means. This does not refly, on the brother man, nat or mizzafil saces are denuded by this ossifaligo...." Harvey switched off the set determinedly. "Wait a minute!" Johnson begged. "I almost got it then!" "I dislike being commercial," said Harvey, "but this astounding device still belongs to us. Would we not be foolish to let you discover the clue before purchasing the right to do so?" The mayor nodded indecisively, looking at the radio with agonized longing. "How much do you want?" he asked unhappily. "One thousand buckos, and no haggling. I am not in the mood." Johnson opened his mouth to argue; then, seeing Harvey's set features, paid with the worst possible grace. "Don't you think we ought to tell him about the batteries, Harv?" Joe asked. "What about the batteries?" demanded Johnson with deadly calm. "A very small matter," Harvey said airily. "You see, we have been analyzing these broadcasts for three years. In that time, of course, the batteries are bound to weaken. I estimate these should last not less than one Terrestrial month, at the very least." "What do I do then?" Harvey shrugged. "Special batteries are required, which I see Joseph has by chance brought along. For the batteries, the only ones of their kind left in the system, I ask only what they cost—one hundred and ninety-nine buckos, no more and, on the other hand, no less." Johnson was breathing hard, and his hand hovered dangerously near his gun. But he paid the amount Harvey wanted. Moreover, he actually shook hands when the two panacea purveyors collected their six-armed prize and said goodbye. Before they were outside, however, he had turned on the radio and was listening tensely to a woman's highly cultured, though rather angry voice, saying: "Oh, you hannaforge are all beasa-taga-sanimort. If you rue amount it, how do you respench a pure woman to ansver go-samak—" "I'll get it!" they heard Johnson mutter. Then the sound of giant feet crossing the barroom floor reached their ears, and a shrill question: "What's that, Papa?" "A fortune, Jed! Those fakers are damned fools, selling us a thing like—" Joe gazed at Harvey admiringly. "Another one sold? Harv, that spiel pulls them in like an ether storm!" Together with the remarkable planetoid man, they reached the ship. Above them, dark, tumbling shapes blotted out the stars and silently moved on. Joe opened the gangway door. "Come on in, pal," he said to Genius. "We're shoving off." The planetoid man grinned foolishly. "Can't go arong with you," he said with an apologetic manner. "I rike to, but pressure fratten me out if I go." "What in solar blazes are you talking about?" Harvey asked. "I grow up on pranetoid," Genius explained. "On big pranet, too much pressure for me." The two salesmen looked narrowly at each other. "Did Johnson know that when he sold you?" Joe snarled. "Oh, sure." The silly grin became wider than ever. "Peopre from Earth buy me rots of times. I never reave pranetoid, though." "Joseph," Harvey said ominously, "that slick colonist has put one over upon us. What is our customary procedure in that event?" "We tear him apart," Joe replied between his teeth. "Not Mister Johnson," advised Genius. "Have gun and badge. He shoot you first and then rock you up in prison." Harvey paused, his ominous air vanishing. "True. There is also the fact, Joseph, that when he discovers the scrambled rectifier in the radio we sold him, he will have been paid back in full for his regrettable dishonesty." Unwillingly, Joe agreed. While Genius retreated to a safe distance, they entered the ship and blasted off. Within a few minutes the automatic steering pilot had maneuvered them above the plane of the asteroid belt. "I got kind of dizzy," Joe said, "there were so many deals back and forth. How much did we make on the sucker?" "A goodly amount, I wager," Harvey responded. He took out a pencil and paper. "Medicine, 469.50; radio, 1,000; batteries, 199. Total—let's see—1668 buckos and 50 redsents. A goodly sum, as I told you." He emptied his pockets of money, spread it out on the astrogation table and began counting. Finished, he looked up, troubled. "How much did we have when we landed, Joseph?" "Exactly 1668 buckos," Joe answered promptly. "I can't understand it," said Harvey. "Instead of double our capital, we now have only 1668 buckos and 50 redsents!" Feverishly, he returned to his pencil and paper. "Drinking water, 790; battery water, free; meal, 328; planetoid man, 550. Total: 1668 buckos!" He stared at the figures. "We paid out almost as much as we took in," he said bitterly. "Despite our intensive efforts, we made the absurd sum of fifty redsents." "Why, the dirty crook!" Joe growled. But after a few moments of sad reflection, Harvey became philosophical. "Perhaps, Joseph, we are more fortunate than we realize. We were, after all, completely in Johnson's power. The more I ponder, the more I believe we were lucky to escape. And, anyhow, we did make fifty redsents on the swindler. A moral victory, my boy." Joe, who had been sunk desparingly into a chair, now stood up slowly and asked: "Remember that bottle-opener we gave him?" "Certainly," Harvey explained. "What about it?" "How much did it cost us?" Harvey's eyebrows puckered. Suddenly he started laughing. "You're right, Joseph. We paid forty-six redsents for it on Venus. So, after all that transacting of business, we made four redsents!" "Four redsents, hell!" Joe snapped. "That was the sales tax!" He glared; then a smile lifted his mouth. "You remember those yokels on Mars' Flatlands, and the way they worshipped gold?" " Goldbricks! " Harvey said succinctly. Grinning, Joe set the robot-controls for Mars.

What is the plot of the story?

6

Harvey Ellswroth and Joe Mallon land on this Planetoid 42 in search of water. These solar salesmen travel the galaxy selling their miraculous elixir, which isn’t so miraculous after all. They find water and are served by Johnson, the barmen, sheriff, and general chief of the land. After drinking eight glasses, their thirst is quenched and they’re ready to pay. At the sight of the large check, they are rightfully appalled, until Johnson explains the reason behind it. The water on this planet is so bitter that it must undergo a rigorous purification process to make it drinkable. Harvey and Joe believe him and pay their sum. They ask if they can fill up the water tank for their spaceship as well, and Johnson points them to the pond. The water there is bitter, but they haul it back and forth. Joe notices a reflection not too far from them and discovers another pond with sweet drinkable water. They realize that they’ve been conned by Johnson. They rush back to the bar to confront him when they meet his son, Jed. Jed is huge, and Harvey and Joe abandon their plan. Quickly, Harvey changes course and asks Jed if he’s feeling ill. Jed feigns illness and collapses, while Johnson assumes it’s the notorious asteroid fever. Harvey rushes to the ship to grab their miraculous cure and forces Joe to drink it. He rises, convincing Johnson of its powers. Johnson quickly asks to buy cases of it, and Harvey agrees, supplying it at a great price. The men run back to the ship to prepare the vials. Harvey is supplementing them with the bitter water, so they save more snake oil. Johnson invites them to eat at his restaurant when they return with the medicine. He cons them yet again here by including a hefty fee at the bottom of the paycheck for the entertainment that Genius provided. Harvey and Joe still decide to barter further and arrange a monetary transaction in exchange for Genius. Johnson agrees though he admits he will miss him. At this, Harvey decides on one last con and sends Joe to pick up their most prized possession. A radio that can reach the fourth dimension. Johnson buys into it and sits down to attempt to translate garbled English. Harvey, Joe, and Genius leave quickly before Johnson realizes the radio is nothing more than tomfoolery. However, the last con is played on Harvey and Joe, as Genius reveals he is unable to leave this planet due to atmospheric pressure differences. Harvey and Joe leave him behind. They count their money and realize they haven’t made any real profit.

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Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net GRIFTERS' ASTEROID By H. L. GOLD Harvey and Joe were the slickest con-men ever to gyp a space-lane sucker. Or so they thought! Angus Johnson knew differently. He charged them five buckos for a glass of water—and got it! [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories May 1943. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Characteristically, Harvey Ellsworth tried to maintain his dignity, though his parched tongue was almost hanging out. But Joe Mallon, with no dignity to maintain, lurched across the rubbish-strewn patch of land that had been termed a spaceport. When Harvey staggered pontifically into the battered metalloy saloon—the only one on Planetoid 42—his tall, gangling partner was already stumbling out, mouthing something incoherent. They met in the doorway, violently. "We're delirious!" Joe cried. "It's a mirage!" "What is?" asked Harvey through a mouthful of cotton. Joe reeled aside, and Harvey saw what had upset his partner. He stared, speechless for once. In their hectic voyages from planet to planet, the pair of panacea purveyors had encountered the usual strange life-forms. But never had they seen anything like the amazing creature in that colonial saloon. Paying no attention to them, it was carrying a case of liquor in two hands, six siphons in two others, and a broom and dustpan in the remaining pair. The bartender, a big man resembling the plumpish Harvey in build, was leaning negligently on the counter, ordering this impossible being to fill the partly-emptied bottles, squeeze fruit juice and sweep the floor, all of which the native did simultaneously. "Nonsense," Harvey croaked uncertainly. "We have seen enough queer things to know there are always more." He led the way inside. Through thirst-cracked lips he rasped: "Water—quick!" Without a word, the bartender reached under the counter, brought out two glasses of water. The interplanetary con-men drank noisily, asked for more, until they had drunk eight glasses. Meanwhile, the bartender had taken out eight jiggers and filled them with whiskey. Harvey and Joe were breathing hard from having gulped the water so fast, but they were beginning to revive. They noticed the bartender's impersonal eyes studying them shrewdly. "Strangers, eh?" he asked at last. "Solar salesmen, my colonial friend," Harvey answered in his usual lush manner. "We purvey that renowned Martian remedy, La-anago Yergis , the formula for which was recently discovered by ourselves in the ancient ruined city of La-anago. Medical science is unanimous in proclaiming this magic medicine the sole panacea in the entire history of therapeutics." "Yeah?" said the bartender disinterestedly, polishing the chaser glasses without washing them. "Where you heading?" "Out of Mars for Ganymede. Our condenser broke down, and we've gone without water for five ghastly days." "Got a mechanic around this dumping ground you call a port?" Joe asked. "We did. He came near starving and moved on to Titan. Ships don't land here unless they're in trouble." "Then where's the water lead-in? We'll fill up and push off." "Mayor takes care of that," replied the saloon owner. "If you gents're finished at the bar, your drinks'll be forty buckos." Harvey grinned puzzledly. "We didn't take any whiskey." "Might as well. Water's five buckos a glass. Liquor's free with every chaser." Harvey's eyes bulged. Joe gulped. "That—that's robbery!" the lanky man managed to get out in a thin quaver. The barkeeper shrugged. "When there ain't many customers, you gotta make more on each one. Besides—" "Besides nothing!" Joe roared, finding his voice again. "You dirty crook—robbing poor spacemen! You—" "You dirty crook!" Joe roared. "Robbing honest spacemen!" Harvey nudged him warningly. "Easy, my boy, easy." He turned to the bartender apologetically. "Don't mind my friend. His adrenal glands are sometimes overactive. You were going to say—?" The round face of the barkeeper had assumed an aggrieved expression. "Folks are always thinkin' the other feller's out to do 'em," he said, shaking his head. "Lemme explain about the water here. It's bitter as some kinds of sin before it's purified. Have to bring it in with buckets and make it sweet. That takes time and labor. Waddya think—I was chargin' feller critters for water just out of devilment? I charge because I gotta." "Friend," said Harvey, taking out a wallet and counting off eight five-bucko bills, "here is your money. What's fair is fair, and you have put a different complexion on what seemed at first to be an unconscionable interjection of a middleman between Nature and man's thirst." The saloon man removed his dirty apron and came around the bar. "If that's an apology, I accept it. Now the mayor'll discuss filling your tanks. That's me. I'm also justice of the peace, official recorder, fire chief...." "And chief of police, no doubt," said Harvey jocosely. "Nope. That's my son, Jed. Angus Johnson's my name. Folks here just call me Chief. I run this town, and run it right. How much water will you need?" Joe estimated quickly. "About seventy-five liters, if we go on half rations," he answered. He waited apprehensively. "Let's say ten buckos a liter," the mayor said. "On account of the quantity, I'm able to quote a bargain price. Shucks, boys, it hurts me more to charge for water than it does for you to pay. I just got to, that's all." The mayor gestured to the native, who shuffled out to the tanks with them. The planetoid man worked the pump while the mayor intently watched the crude level-gauge, crying "Stop!" when it registered the proper amount. Then Johnson rubbed his thumb on his index finger and wetted his lips expectantly. Harvey bravely counted off the bills. He asked: "But what are we to do about replenishing our battery fluid? Ten buckos a liter would be preposterous. We simply can't afford it." Johnson's response almost floored them. "Who said anything about charging you for battery water? You can have all you want for nothing. It's just the purified stuff that comes so high." After giving them directions that would take them to the free-water pool, the ponderous factotum of Planetoid 42 shook hands and headed back to the saloon. His six-armed assistant followed him inside. "Now do you see, my hot-tempered colleague?" said Harvey as he and Joe picked up buckets that hung on the tank. "Johnson, as I saw instantly, is the victim of a difficult environment, and must charge accordingly." "Just the same," Joe griped, "paying for water isn't something you can get used to in ten minutes." In the fragile forest, they soon came across a stream that sprang from the igneous soil and splashed into the small pond whose contents, according to the mayor, was theirs for the asking. They filled their buckets and hauled them to the ship, then returned for more. It was on the sixth trip that Joe caught a glimpse of Jupiter-shine on a bright surface off to the left. The figure, 750, with the bucko sign in front of it, was still doing acrobatics inside his skull and keeping a faint suspicion alive in him. So he called Harvey and they went to investigate. Among the skimpy ground-crawling vines, they saw a long slender mound that was unmistakably a buried pipe. "What's this doing here?" Harvey asked, puzzled. "I thought Johnson had to transport water in pails." "Wonder where it leads to," Joe said uneasily. "It leads to the saloon," said Harvey, his eyes rapidly tracing the pipe back toward the spaceport. "What I am concerned with is where it leads from ." Five minutes later, panting heavily from the unaccustomed exertion of scrambling through the tangle of planetorial undergrowth, they burst into the open—before a clear, sparkling pool. Mutely, Harvey pointed out a pipe-end jutting under the water. "I am growing suspicious," he said in a rigidly controlled voice. But Joe was already on his knees, scooping up a handful of water and tasting it. "Sweet!" he snarled. They rushed back to the first pool, where Joe again tasted a sample. His mouth went wry. "Bitter! He uses only one pool, the sweet one! The only thing that needs purifying around here is that blasted mayor's conscience." "The asteroidal Poobah has tricked us with a slick come-on," said Harvey slowly. His eyes grew cold. "Joseph, the good-natured artist in me has become a hard and merciless avenger. I shall not rest until we have had the best of this colonial con-man! Watch your cues from this point hence." Fists clenched, the two returned to the saloon. But at the door they stopped and their fists unclenched. "Thought you gents were leaving," the mayor called out, seeing them frozen in the doorway. "Glad you didn't. Now you can meet my son, Jed. Him and me are the whole Earthman population of Johnson City." "You don't need any more," said Harvey, dismayed. Johnson's eight-foot son, topped by a massive roof of sun-bleached hair and held up by a foundation that seemed immovable, had obviously been born and raised in low gravity. For any decent-sized world would have kept him down near the general dimensions of a man. He held out an acre of palm. Harvey studied it worriedly, put his own hand somewhere on it, swallowed as it closed, then breathed again when his fingers were released in five units instead of a single compressed one. "Pleased to meet you," piped a voice that had never known a dense atmosphere. The pursuit of vengeance, Harvey realized, had taken a quick and unpleasant turn. Something shrewd was called for.... "Joseph!" he exclaimed, looking at his partner in alarm. "Don't you feel well?" Even before the others could turn to him, Joe's practiced eyes were gently crossing. He sagged against the door frame, all his features drooping like a bloodhound's. "Bring him in here!" Johnson cried. "I mean, get him away! He's coming down with asteroid fever!" "Of course," replied Harvey calmly. "Any fool knows the first symptoms of the disease that once scourged the universe." "What do you mean, once ?" demanded Johnson. "I come down with it every year, and I ain't hankering to have it in an off-season. Get him out of here!" "In good time. He can't be moved immediately." "Then he'll be here for months!" Harvey helped Joe to the counter and lifted him up on it. The mayor and his gigantic offspring were cowering across the room, trying to breathe in tiny, uncontaminating gasps. "You'll find everything you want in the back room," Johnson said frantically, "sulfopyridine, mustard plasters, rubs, inhalers, suction cups—" "Relics of the past," Harvey stated. "One medication is all modern man requires to combat the dread menace, asteroid fever." "What's that?" asked the mayor without conviction. Instead of replying, Harvey hurried outside to the ungainly second-hand rocket ship in the center of the shabby spaceport. He returned within a few minutes, carrying a bottle. Joe was still stretched out on the bar, panting, his eyes slowly crossing and uncrossing. Harvey lifted the patient's head tenderly, put the bottle to his lips and tilted it until he was forced to drink. When Joe tried to pull away, Harvey was inexorable. He made his partner drink until most of the liquid was gone. Then he stepped back and waited for the inevitable result. Joe's performance was better than ever. He lay supine for several moments, his face twisted into an expression that seemed doomed to perpetual wryness. Slowly, however, he sat up and his features straightened out. "Are—are you all right?" asked the mayor anxiously. "Much better," said Joe in a weak voice. "Maybe you need another dose," Harvey suggested. Joe recoiled. "I'm fine now!" he cried, and sprang off the bar to prove it. Astonished, Johnson and his son drew closer. They searched Joe's face, and then the mayor timidly felt his pulse. "Well, I'll be hanged!" Johnson ejaculated. " La-anago Yergis never fails, my friend," Harvey explained. "By actual test, it conquers asteroid fever in from four to twenty-three minutes, depending on the severity of the attack. Luckily, we caught this one before it grew formidable." The mayor's eyes became clouded mirrors of an inward conflict. "If you don't charge too much," he said warily, "I might think of buying some." "We do not sell this unbelievable remedy," Harvey replied with dignity. "It sells itself." "'Course, I'd expect a considerable reduction if I bought a whole case," said Johnson. "That would be the smallest investment you could make, compared with the vast loss of time and strength the fever involves." "How much?" asked the mayor unhappily. "For you, since you have taken us in so hospitably, a mere five hundred buckos." Johnson did not actually stagger back, but he gave the impression of doing so. "F-four hundred," he offered. "Not a red cent less than four seventy-five," Harvey said flatly. "Make it four fifty," quavered Johnson. "I dislike haggling," said Harvey. The final price, however, was four hundred and sixty-nine buckos and fifty redsents. Magnanimously, Harvey added: "And we will include, gratis , an elegant bottle-opener, a superb product of Mercurian handicraftsmanship." Johnson stabbed out a warning finger. "No tricks now. I want a taste of that stuff. You're not switching some worthless junk on me." Harvey took a glass from the bar and poured him a generous sample. The mayor sniffed it, grimaced, then threw it down his gullet. The ensuing minute saw a grim battle between a man and his stomach, a battle which the man gradually won. "There ain't no words for that taste," he gulped when it was safe to talk again. "Medicine," Harvey propounded, "should taste like medicine." To Joe he said: "Come, my esteemed colleague. We must perform the sacred task to which we have dedicated ourselves." With Joe stumbling along behind, he left the saloon, crossed the clearing and entered the ship. As soon as they were inside, Joe dropped his murderous silence and cried: "What kind of a dirty trick was that, giving me poison instead of that snake oil?" "That was not poison," Harvey contradicted quietly. "It was La-anago Yergis extract, plus." "Plus what—arsenic?" "Now, Joseph! Consider my quandary when I came back here to manufacture our specific for all known ailments, with the intention of selling yonder asteroidal tin-horn a bill of medical goods—an entire case, mind you. Was I to mix the extract with the water for which we had been swindled to the tune of ten buckos a liter? Where would our profit have been, then? No; I had to use the bitter free water, of course." "But why use it on me?" Joe demanded furiously. Harvey looked reprovingly at his gangling partner. "Did Johnson ask to taste it, or did he not? One must look ahead, Joseph. I had to produce the same medicine that we will now manufacture. Thus, you were a guinea pig for a splendid cause." "Okay, okay," Joe said. "But you shoulda charged him more." "Joseph, I promise you that we shall get back every redsent of which that swindler cheated us, besides whatever other funds or valuables he possesses. We could not be content with less." "Well, we're starting all right," admitted Joe. "How about that thing with six arms? He looks like a valuable. Can't we grab him off?" Harvey stopped filling bottles and looked up pensively. "I have every hope of luring away the profitable monstrosity. Apparently you have also surmised the fortune we could make with him. At first I purpose to exhibit him on our interplanetary tours with our streamlined panacea; he would be a spectacular attraction for bucolic suckers. Later, a brief period of demonstrating his abilities on the audio-visiphone. Then our triumph—we shall sell him at a stupendous figure to the zoo!" Joe was still dazed by that monetary vista when he and Harvey carried the case of medicine to the saloon. The mayor had already cleared a place of honor in the cluttered back room, where he told them to put it down carefully. Then he took the elaborate bottle-opener Harvey gave him, reverently uncorked a bottle and sampled it. It must have been at least as good as the first; he gagged. "That's the stuff, all right," he said, swallowing hard. He counted out the money into Harvey's hand, at a moderate rate that precariously balanced between his pleasure at getting the fever remedy and his pain at paying for it. Then he glanced out to see the position of Jupiter, and asked: "You gents eaten yet? The restaurant's open now." Harvey and Joe looked at each other. They hadn't been thinking about food at all, but suddenly they realized that they were hungry. "It's only water we were short of," Harvey said apprehensively. "We've got rations back at the ship." " H-mph! " the mayor grunted. "Powdered concentrates. Compressed pap. Suit yourselves. We treat our stomachs better here. And you're welcome to our hospitality." "Your hospitality," said Harvey, "depends on the prices you charge." "Well, if that's what's worrying you, you can stop worrying," answered the mayor promptly. "What's more, the kind of dinner I serve here you can't get anywhere else for any price." Swiftly, Harvey conned the possibilities of being bilked again. He saw none. "Let's take a look at the menu, anyhow, Joe," he said guardedly. Johnson immediately fell into the role of "mine host." "Come right in, gents," he invited. "Right into the dining room." He seated them at a table, which a rope tied between posts made more or less private, though nobody else was in the saloon and there was little chance of company. Genius, the six-armed native, appeared from the dingy kitchen with two menus in one hand, two glasses of water in another, plus napkins, silverware, a pitcher, plates, saucers, cups, and their cocktails, which were on the house. Then he stood by for orders. Harvey and Joe studied the menu critically. The prices were phenomenally low. When they glanced up at Johnson in perplexity, he grinned, bowed and asked: "Everything satisfactory, gents?" "Quite," said Harvey. "We shall order." For an hour they were served amazing dishes, both fresh and canned, the culinary wealth of this planetoid and all the system. And the service was as extraordinary as the meal itself. With four hands, Genius played deftly upon a pair of mellow Venusian viotars , using his other two hands for waiting on the table. "We absolutely must purchase this incredible specimen," Harvey whispered excitedly when Johnson and the native were both in the kitchen, attending to the next course. "He would make any society hostess's season a riotous success, which should be worth a great sum to women like Mrs. van Schuyler-Morgan, merely for his hire." "Think of a fast one fast," Joe agreed. "You're right." "But I dislike having to revise my opinion of a man so often," complained Harvey. "I wish Johnson would stay either swindler or honest merchant. This dinner is worth as least twenty buckos, yet I estimate our check at a mere bucko twenty redsents." The mayor's appearance prevented them from continuing the discussion. "It's been a great honor, gents," he said. "Ain't often I have visitors, and I like the best, like you two gents." As if on cue, Genius came out and put the check down between Joe and Harvey. Harvey picked it up negligently, but his casual air vanished in a yelp of horror. "What the devil is this?" he shouted.—"How do you arrive at this fantastic, idiotic figure— three hundred and twenty-eight buckos !" Johnson didn't answer. Neither did Genius; he simply put on the table, not a fingerbowl, but a magnifying glass. With one of his thirty fingers he pointed politely to the bottom of the menu. Harvey focused on the microscopic print, and his face went pasty with rage. The minute note read: "Services and entertainment, 327 buckos 80 redsents." "You can go to hell!" Joe growled. "We won't pay it!" Johnson sighed ponderously. "I was afraid you'd act like that," he said with regret. He pulled a tin badge out of his rear pocket, pinned it on his vest, and twisted his holstered gun into view. "Afraid I'll have to ask the sheriff to take over." Johnson, the "sheriff," collected the money, and Johnson, the "restaurateur," pocketed it. Meanwhile, Harvey tipped Joe the sign to remain calm. "My friend," he said to the mayor, and his tones took on a schoolmasterish severity, "your long absence from Earth has perhaps made you forget those elements of human wisdom that have entered the folk-lore of your native planet. Such as, for example: 'It is folly to kill a goose that lays golden eggs,' and 'Penny wise is pound foolish.'" "I don't get the connection," objected Johnson. "Well, by obliging us to pay such a high price for your dinner, you put out of your reach the chance of profiting from a really substantial deal. My partner and I were prepared to make you a sizable offer for the peculiar creature you call Genius. But by reducing our funds the way you have—" "Who said I wanted to sell him?" the mayor interrupted. He rubbed his fingers together and asked disinterestedly: "What were you going to offer, anyhow?" "It doesn't matter any longer," Harvey said with elaborate carelessness. "Perhaps you wouldn't have accepted it, anyway." "That's right," Johnson came back emphatically. "But what would your offer have been which I would have turned down?" "Which one? The one we were going to make, or the one we can make now?" "Either one. It don't make no difference. Genius is too valuable to sell." "Oh, come now, Mr. Johnson. Don't tell me no amount of money would tempt you!" "Nope. But how much did you say?" "Ah, then you will consider releasing Genius!" "Well, I'll tell you something," said the mayor confidentially. "When you've got one thing, you've got one thing. But when you've got money, it's the same as having a lot of things. Because, if you've got money, you can buy this and that and this and that and—" "This and that," concluded Joe. "We'll give you five hundred buckos." "Now, gents!" Johnson remonstrated. "Why, six hundred would hardly—" "You haven't left us much money," Harvey put in. The mayor frowned. "All right, we'll split the difference. Make it five-fifty." Harvey was quick to pay out, for this was a genuine windfall. Then he stood up and admired the astonishing possession he had so inexpensively acquired. "I really hate to deprive you of this unique creature," he said to Johnson. "I should imagine you will be rather lonely, with only your filial mammoth to keep you company." "I sure will," Johnson confessed glumly. "I got pretty attached to Genius, and I'm going to miss him something awful." Harvey forcibly removed his eyes from the native, who was clearing off the table almost all at once. "My friend," he said, "we take your only solace, it is true, but in his place we can offer something no less amazing and instructive." The mayor's hand went protectively to his pocket. "What is it?" he asked with the suspicion of a man who has seen human nature at its worst and expects nothing better. "Joseph, get our most prized belonging from the communications room of the ship," Harvey instructed. To Johnson he explained: "You must see the wondrous instrument before its value can be appreciated. My partner will soon have it here for your astonishment." Joe's face grew as glum as Johnson's had been. "Aw, Harv," he protested, "do we have to sell it? And right when I thought we were getting the key!" "We must not be selfish, my boy," Harvey said nobly. "We have had our chance; now we must relinquish Fate to the hands of a man who might have more success than we. Go, Joseph. Bring it here." Unwillingly, Joe turned and shuffled out. On a larger and heavier world than Planetoid 42, Johnson's curiosity would probably have had weight and mass. He was bursting with questions, but he was obviously afraid they would cost him money. For his part, Harvey allowed that curiosity to grow like a Venusian amoeba until Joe came in, lugging a radio. "Is that what you were talking about?" the mayor snorted. "What makes you think I want a radio? I came here to get away from singers and political speech-makers." "Do not jump to hasty conclusions," Harvey cautioned. "Another word, and I shall refuse you the greatest opportunity any man has ever had, with the sole exceptions of Joseph, myself and the unfortunate inventor of this absolutely awe-inspiring device." "I ain't in the market for a radio," Johnson said stubbornly. Harvey nodded in relief. "We have attempted to repay our host, Joseph. He has spurned our generosity. We have now the chance to continue our study, which I am positive will soon reward us with the key to an enormous fortune." "Well, that's no plating off our bow," Joe grunted. "I'm glad he did turn it down. I hated to give it up after working on it for three whole years." He picked up the radio and began walking toward the door. "Now, hold on!" the mayor cried. "I ain't saying I'll buy, but what is it I'm turning down?" Joe returned and set the instrument down on the bar. His face sorrowful, Harvey fondly stroked the scarred plasticoid cabinet. "To make a long story, Mr. Johnson," he said, "Joseph and I were among the chosen few who knew the famous Doctor Dean intimately. Just before his tragic death, you will recall, Dean allegedly went insane." He banged his fist on the bar. "I have said it before, and I repeat again, that was a malicious lie, spread by the doctor's enemies to discredit his greatest invention—this fourth dimensional radio!" "This what?" Johnson blurted out. "In simple terms," clarified Harvey, "the ingenious doctor discovered that the yawning chasm between the dimensions could be bridged by energy of all quanta. There has never been any question that the inhabitants of the super-dimension would be far more civilized than ourselves. Consequently, the man who could tap their knowledge would find himself in possession of a powerful, undreamt-of science!" The mayor looked respectfully at the silent box on the bar. "And this thing gets broadcasts from the fourth dimension?" "It does, Mr. Johnson! Only charlatans like those who envied Doctor Dean's magnificent accomplishments could deny that fact." The mayor put his hands in his pockets, unswiveled one hip and stared thoughtfully at the battered cabinet. "Well, let's say it picks up fourth dimensional broadcasts," he conceded. "But how could you understand what they're saying? Folks up there wouldn't talk our language." Again Harvey smashed his fist down. "Do you dare to repeat the scurvy lie that broke Dean's spirit and drove him to suicide?" Johnson recoiled. "No—no, of course not . I mean, being up here, I naturally couldn't get all the details." "Naturally," Harvey agreed, mollified. "I'm sorry I lost my temper. But it is a matter of record that the doctor proved the broadcasts emanating from the super-dimension were in English! Why should that be so difficult to believe? Is it impossible that at one time there was communication between the dimensions, that the super-beings admired our language and adopted it in all its beauty, adding to it their own hyper-scientific trimmings?" "Why, I don't know," Johnson said in confusion. "For three years, Joseph and I lost sleep and hair, trying to detect the simple key that would translate the somewhat metamorphosed broadcasts into our primitive English. It eluded us. Even the doctor failed. But that was understandable; a sensitive soul like his could stand only so much. And the combination of ridicule and failure to solve the mystery caused him to take his own life." Johnson winced. "Is that what you want to unload on me?" "For a very good reason, sir. Patience is the virtue that will be rewarded with the key to these fourth dimensional broadcasts. A man who could devote his life to improving this lonely worldlet is obviously a person with unusual patience." "Yeah," the mayor said grudgingly, "I ain't exactly flighty." "Therefore, you are the man who could unravel the problem!" Johnson asked skeptically: "How about a sample first?" Harvey turned a knob on the face of the scarred radio. After several squeals of spatial figures, a smooth voice began: "There are omnious pleajes of moby-hailegs in sonmirand which, howgraismon, are notch to be donfured miss ellasellabell in either or both hagasanipaj, by all means. This does not refly, on the brother man, nat or mizzafil saces are denuded by this ossifaligo...." Harvey switched off the set determinedly. "Wait a minute!" Johnson begged. "I almost got it then!" "I dislike being commercial," said Harvey, "but this astounding device still belongs to us. Would we not be foolish to let you discover the clue before purchasing the right to do so?" The mayor nodded indecisively, looking at the radio with agonized longing. "How much do you want?" he asked unhappily. "One thousand buckos, and no haggling. I am not in the mood." Johnson opened his mouth to argue; then, seeing Harvey's set features, paid with the worst possible grace. "Don't you think we ought to tell him about the batteries, Harv?" Joe asked. "What about the batteries?" demanded Johnson with deadly calm. "A very small matter," Harvey said airily. "You see, we have been analyzing these broadcasts for three years. In that time, of course, the batteries are bound to weaken. I estimate these should last not less than one Terrestrial month, at the very least." "What do I do then?" Harvey shrugged. "Special batteries are required, which I see Joseph has by chance brought along. For the batteries, the only ones of their kind left in the system, I ask only what they cost—one hundred and ninety-nine buckos, no more and, on the other hand, no less." Johnson was breathing hard, and his hand hovered dangerously near his gun. But he paid the amount Harvey wanted. Moreover, he actually shook hands when the two panacea purveyors collected their six-armed prize and said goodbye. Before they were outside, however, he had turned on the radio and was listening tensely to a woman's highly cultured, though rather angry voice, saying: "Oh, you hannaforge are all beasa-taga-sanimort. If you rue amount it, how do you respench a pure woman to ansver go-samak—" "I'll get it!" they heard Johnson mutter. Then the sound of giant feet crossing the barroom floor reached their ears, and a shrill question: "What's that, Papa?" "A fortune, Jed! Those fakers are damned fools, selling us a thing like—" Joe gazed at Harvey admiringly. "Another one sold? Harv, that spiel pulls them in like an ether storm!" Together with the remarkable planetoid man, they reached the ship. Above them, dark, tumbling shapes blotted out the stars and silently moved on. Joe opened the gangway door. "Come on in, pal," he said to Genius. "We're shoving off." The planetoid man grinned foolishly. "Can't go arong with you," he said with an apologetic manner. "I rike to, but pressure fratten me out if I go." "What in solar blazes are you talking about?" Harvey asked. "I grow up on pranetoid," Genius explained. "On big pranet, too much pressure for me." The two salesmen looked narrowly at each other. "Did Johnson know that when he sold you?" Joe snarled. "Oh, sure." The silly grin became wider than ever. "Peopre from Earth buy me rots of times. I never reave pranetoid, though." "Joseph," Harvey said ominously, "that slick colonist has put one over upon us. What is our customary procedure in that event?" "We tear him apart," Joe replied between his teeth. "Not Mister Johnson," advised Genius. "Have gun and badge. He shoot you first and then rock you up in prison." Harvey paused, his ominous air vanishing. "True. There is also the fact, Joseph, that when he discovers the scrambled rectifier in the radio we sold him, he will have been paid back in full for his regrettable dishonesty." Unwillingly, Joe agreed. While Genius retreated to a safe distance, they entered the ship and blasted off. Within a few minutes the automatic steering pilot had maneuvered them above the plane of the asteroid belt. "I got kind of dizzy," Joe said, "there were so many deals back and forth. How much did we make on the sucker?" "A goodly amount, I wager," Harvey responded. He took out a pencil and paper. "Medicine, 469.50; radio, 1,000; batteries, 199. Total—let's see—1668 buckos and 50 redsents. A goodly sum, as I told you." He emptied his pockets of money, spread it out on the astrogation table and began counting. Finished, he looked up, troubled. "How much did we have when we landed, Joseph?" "Exactly 1668 buckos," Joe answered promptly. "I can't understand it," said Harvey. "Instead of double our capital, we now have only 1668 buckos and 50 redsents!" Feverishly, he returned to his pencil and paper. "Drinking water, 790; battery water, free; meal, 328; planetoid man, 550. Total: 1668 buckos!" He stared at the figures. "We paid out almost as much as we took in," he said bitterly. "Despite our intensive efforts, we made the absurd sum of fifty redsents." "Why, the dirty crook!" Joe growled. But after a few moments of sad reflection, Harvey became philosophical. "Perhaps, Joseph, we are more fortunate than we realize. We were, after all, completely in Johnson's power. The more I ponder, the more I believe we were lucky to escape. And, anyhow, we did make fifty redsents on the swindler. A moral victory, my boy." Joe, who had been sunk desparingly into a chair, now stood up slowly and asked: "Remember that bottle-opener we gave him?" "Certainly," Harvey explained. "What about it?" "How much did it cost us?" Harvey's eyebrows puckered. Suddenly he started laughing. "You're right, Joseph. We paid forty-six redsents for it on Venus. So, after all that transacting of business, we made four redsents!" "Four redsents, hell!" Joe snapped. "That was the sales tax!" He glared; then a smile lifted his mouth. "You remember those yokels on Mars' Flatlands, and the way they worshipped gold?" " Goldbricks! " Harvey said succinctly. Grinning, Joe set the robot-controls for Mars.

What is the plot of the story?

3

Harvey Ellsworth and Joe Mallon have landed on Planetoid 42, somewhere between Mars and Ganymede, out of water and in need of supplies. They find a saloon manned by a six-armed life-form and a bartender named Johnson. Harvey and Joe ask for water, which they get, but are charged forty buckos, presumably because there is a high price to get water filtered in this area. The men are astounded but Harvey tries to be understanding of the unusual situation, and pays Johnson the money he asks for. It turns out that Johnson is not just the bartender, but also the mayor, among other jobs. He works out a deal for the men to fill their tanks with purified water, claims to give them a bargain price, and sends his assistant out to the pumps to help the men. Although purified water is expensive, unpurified water used as battery fluid is free, and Johnson points the men to the body of water where they can find what they need. As Joe and Harvey are collecting battery water, they find pipes that carry purified water to the saloon from a clean pool—Johnson had lied about the purification system, and thus charged them way more than the water was worth (twice), so Harvey decides they need revenge. Joe pretends to get asteroid fever, which terrifies Johnson, and Harvey concocts a fake medicine using some of the bitter water to convince Johnson to buy a case from him. The back-and-forth of cons continues: Johnson lures them into a meal with inexpensive food but an expensive hidden surcharge for service and entertainment. Then, Harvey “convinces” Johnson to sell him Genius, his assistant, and Joe and Harvey convince Johnson to buy a radio that they inserted a scrambler into, claiming it had hidden knowledge from the fourth dimension. This whole time, Johnson acts as though he doesn’t have any interest in things he wants to buy, for as long as he can maintain that appearance. However, Joe and Harvey will often get him interested by the end, with Johnson becoming upset when he can’t have what he wants. In the end, it turns out Genius can’t actually leave Planetoid 42, because he would be crushed by a larger planet’s gravity, and Joe and Harvey leave somewhat dejected, hoping that they managed to make some amount of money from the whole ordeal. It turns out they broke exactly even, so they had a good laugh of frustration and went on to Mars to try another plan.

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Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net GRIFTERS' ASTEROID By H. L. GOLD Harvey and Joe were the slickest con-men ever to gyp a space-lane sucker. Or so they thought! Angus Johnson knew differently. He charged them five buckos for a glass of water—and got it! [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories May 1943. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Characteristically, Harvey Ellsworth tried to maintain his dignity, though his parched tongue was almost hanging out. But Joe Mallon, with no dignity to maintain, lurched across the rubbish-strewn patch of land that had been termed a spaceport. When Harvey staggered pontifically into the battered metalloy saloon—the only one on Planetoid 42—his tall, gangling partner was already stumbling out, mouthing something incoherent. They met in the doorway, violently. "We're delirious!" Joe cried. "It's a mirage!" "What is?" asked Harvey through a mouthful of cotton. Joe reeled aside, and Harvey saw what had upset his partner. He stared, speechless for once. In their hectic voyages from planet to planet, the pair of panacea purveyors had encountered the usual strange life-forms. But never had they seen anything like the amazing creature in that colonial saloon. Paying no attention to them, it was carrying a case of liquor in two hands, six siphons in two others, and a broom and dustpan in the remaining pair. The bartender, a big man resembling the plumpish Harvey in build, was leaning negligently on the counter, ordering this impossible being to fill the partly-emptied bottles, squeeze fruit juice and sweep the floor, all of which the native did simultaneously. "Nonsense," Harvey croaked uncertainly. "We have seen enough queer things to know there are always more." He led the way inside. Through thirst-cracked lips he rasped: "Water—quick!" Without a word, the bartender reached under the counter, brought out two glasses of water. The interplanetary con-men drank noisily, asked for more, until they had drunk eight glasses. Meanwhile, the bartender had taken out eight jiggers and filled them with whiskey. Harvey and Joe were breathing hard from having gulped the water so fast, but they were beginning to revive. They noticed the bartender's impersonal eyes studying them shrewdly. "Strangers, eh?" he asked at last. "Solar salesmen, my colonial friend," Harvey answered in his usual lush manner. "We purvey that renowned Martian remedy, La-anago Yergis , the formula for which was recently discovered by ourselves in the ancient ruined city of La-anago. Medical science is unanimous in proclaiming this magic medicine the sole panacea in the entire history of therapeutics." "Yeah?" said the bartender disinterestedly, polishing the chaser glasses without washing them. "Where you heading?" "Out of Mars for Ganymede. Our condenser broke down, and we've gone without water for five ghastly days." "Got a mechanic around this dumping ground you call a port?" Joe asked. "We did. He came near starving and moved on to Titan. Ships don't land here unless they're in trouble." "Then where's the water lead-in? We'll fill up and push off." "Mayor takes care of that," replied the saloon owner. "If you gents're finished at the bar, your drinks'll be forty buckos." Harvey grinned puzzledly. "We didn't take any whiskey." "Might as well. Water's five buckos a glass. Liquor's free with every chaser." Harvey's eyes bulged. Joe gulped. "That—that's robbery!" the lanky man managed to get out in a thin quaver. The barkeeper shrugged. "When there ain't many customers, you gotta make more on each one. Besides—" "Besides nothing!" Joe roared, finding his voice again. "You dirty crook—robbing poor spacemen! You—" "You dirty crook!" Joe roared. "Robbing honest spacemen!" Harvey nudged him warningly. "Easy, my boy, easy." He turned to the bartender apologetically. "Don't mind my friend. His adrenal glands are sometimes overactive. You were going to say—?" The round face of the barkeeper had assumed an aggrieved expression. "Folks are always thinkin' the other feller's out to do 'em," he said, shaking his head. "Lemme explain about the water here. It's bitter as some kinds of sin before it's purified. Have to bring it in with buckets and make it sweet. That takes time and labor. Waddya think—I was chargin' feller critters for water just out of devilment? I charge because I gotta." "Friend," said Harvey, taking out a wallet and counting off eight five-bucko bills, "here is your money. What's fair is fair, and you have put a different complexion on what seemed at first to be an unconscionable interjection of a middleman between Nature and man's thirst." The saloon man removed his dirty apron and came around the bar. "If that's an apology, I accept it. Now the mayor'll discuss filling your tanks. That's me. I'm also justice of the peace, official recorder, fire chief...." "And chief of police, no doubt," said Harvey jocosely. "Nope. That's my son, Jed. Angus Johnson's my name. Folks here just call me Chief. I run this town, and run it right. How much water will you need?" Joe estimated quickly. "About seventy-five liters, if we go on half rations," he answered. He waited apprehensively. "Let's say ten buckos a liter," the mayor said. "On account of the quantity, I'm able to quote a bargain price. Shucks, boys, it hurts me more to charge for water than it does for you to pay. I just got to, that's all." The mayor gestured to the native, who shuffled out to the tanks with them. The planetoid man worked the pump while the mayor intently watched the crude level-gauge, crying "Stop!" when it registered the proper amount. Then Johnson rubbed his thumb on his index finger and wetted his lips expectantly. Harvey bravely counted off the bills. He asked: "But what are we to do about replenishing our battery fluid? Ten buckos a liter would be preposterous. We simply can't afford it." Johnson's response almost floored them. "Who said anything about charging you for battery water? You can have all you want for nothing. It's just the purified stuff that comes so high." After giving them directions that would take them to the free-water pool, the ponderous factotum of Planetoid 42 shook hands and headed back to the saloon. His six-armed assistant followed him inside. "Now do you see, my hot-tempered colleague?" said Harvey as he and Joe picked up buckets that hung on the tank. "Johnson, as I saw instantly, is the victim of a difficult environment, and must charge accordingly." "Just the same," Joe griped, "paying for water isn't something you can get used to in ten minutes." In the fragile forest, they soon came across a stream that sprang from the igneous soil and splashed into the small pond whose contents, according to the mayor, was theirs for the asking. They filled their buckets and hauled them to the ship, then returned for more. It was on the sixth trip that Joe caught a glimpse of Jupiter-shine on a bright surface off to the left. The figure, 750, with the bucko sign in front of it, was still doing acrobatics inside his skull and keeping a faint suspicion alive in him. So he called Harvey and they went to investigate. Among the skimpy ground-crawling vines, they saw a long slender mound that was unmistakably a buried pipe. "What's this doing here?" Harvey asked, puzzled. "I thought Johnson had to transport water in pails." "Wonder where it leads to," Joe said uneasily. "It leads to the saloon," said Harvey, his eyes rapidly tracing the pipe back toward the spaceport. "What I am concerned with is where it leads from ." Five minutes later, panting heavily from the unaccustomed exertion of scrambling through the tangle of planetorial undergrowth, they burst into the open—before a clear, sparkling pool. Mutely, Harvey pointed out a pipe-end jutting under the water. "I am growing suspicious," he said in a rigidly controlled voice. But Joe was already on his knees, scooping up a handful of water and tasting it. "Sweet!" he snarled. They rushed back to the first pool, where Joe again tasted a sample. His mouth went wry. "Bitter! He uses only one pool, the sweet one! The only thing that needs purifying around here is that blasted mayor's conscience." "The asteroidal Poobah has tricked us with a slick come-on," said Harvey slowly. His eyes grew cold. "Joseph, the good-natured artist in me has become a hard and merciless avenger. I shall not rest until we have had the best of this colonial con-man! Watch your cues from this point hence." Fists clenched, the two returned to the saloon. But at the door they stopped and their fists unclenched. "Thought you gents were leaving," the mayor called out, seeing them frozen in the doorway. "Glad you didn't. Now you can meet my son, Jed. Him and me are the whole Earthman population of Johnson City." "You don't need any more," said Harvey, dismayed. Johnson's eight-foot son, topped by a massive roof of sun-bleached hair and held up by a foundation that seemed immovable, had obviously been born and raised in low gravity. For any decent-sized world would have kept him down near the general dimensions of a man. He held out an acre of palm. Harvey studied it worriedly, put his own hand somewhere on it, swallowed as it closed, then breathed again when his fingers were released in five units instead of a single compressed one. "Pleased to meet you," piped a voice that had never known a dense atmosphere. The pursuit of vengeance, Harvey realized, had taken a quick and unpleasant turn. Something shrewd was called for.... "Joseph!" he exclaimed, looking at his partner in alarm. "Don't you feel well?" Even before the others could turn to him, Joe's practiced eyes were gently crossing. He sagged against the door frame, all his features drooping like a bloodhound's. "Bring him in here!" Johnson cried. "I mean, get him away! He's coming down with asteroid fever!" "Of course," replied Harvey calmly. "Any fool knows the first symptoms of the disease that once scourged the universe." "What do you mean, once ?" demanded Johnson. "I come down with it every year, and I ain't hankering to have it in an off-season. Get him out of here!" "In good time. He can't be moved immediately." "Then he'll be here for months!" Harvey helped Joe to the counter and lifted him up on it. The mayor and his gigantic offspring were cowering across the room, trying to breathe in tiny, uncontaminating gasps. "You'll find everything you want in the back room," Johnson said frantically, "sulfopyridine, mustard plasters, rubs, inhalers, suction cups—" "Relics of the past," Harvey stated. "One medication is all modern man requires to combat the dread menace, asteroid fever." "What's that?" asked the mayor without conviction. Instead of replying, Harvey hurried outside to the ungainly second-hand rocket ship in the center of the shabby spaceport. He returned within a few minutes, carrying a bottle. Joe was still stretched out on the bar, panting, his eyes slowly crossing and uncrossing. Harvey lifted the patient's head tenderly, put the bottle to his lips and tilted it until he was forced to drink. When Joe tried to pull away, Harvey was inexorable. He made his partner drink until most of the liquid was gone. Then he stepped back and waited for the inevitable result. Joe's performance was better than ever. He lay supine for several moments, his face twisted into an expression that seemed doomed to perpetual wryness. Slowly, however, he sat up and his features straightened out. "Are—are you all right?" asked the mayor anxiously. "Much better," said Joe in a weak voice. "Maybe you need another dose," Harvey suggested. Joe recoiled. "I'm fine now!" he cried, and sprang off the bar to prove it. Astonished, Johnson and his son drew closer. They searched Joe's face, and then the mayor timidly felt his pulse. "Well, I'll be hanged!" Johnson ejaculated. " La-anago Yergis never fails, my friend," Harvey explained. "By actual test, it conquers asteroid fever in from four to twenty-three minutes, depending on the severity of the attack. Luckily, we caught this one before it grew formidable." The mayor's eyes became clouded mirrors of an inward conflict. "If you don't charge too much," he said warily, "I might think of buying some." "We do not sell this unbelievable remedy," Harvey replied with dignity. "It sells itself." "'Course, I'd expect a considerable reduction if I bought a whole case," said Johnson. "That would be the smallest investment you could make, compared with the vast loss of time and strength the fever involves." "How much?" asked the mayor unhappily. "For you, since you have taken us in so hospitably, a mere five hundred buckos." Johnson did not actually stagger back, but he gave the impression of doing so. "F-four hundred," he offered. "Not a red cent less than four seventy-five," Harvey said flatly. "Make it four fifty," quavered Johnson. "I dislike haggling," said Harvey. The final price, however, was four hundred and sixty-nine buckos and fifty redsents. Magnanimously, Harvey added: "And we will include, gratis , an elegant bottle-opener, a superb product of Mercurian handicraftsmanship." Johnson stabbed out a warning finger. "No tricks now. I want a taste of that stuff. You're not switching some worthless junk on me." Harvey took a glass from the bar and poured him a generous sample. The mayor sniffed it, grimaced, then threw it down his gullet. The ensuing minute saw a grim battle between a man and his stomach, a battle which the man gradually won. "There ain't no words for that taste," he gulped when it was safe to talk again. "Medicine," Harvey propounded, "should taste like medicine." To Joe he said: "Come, my esteemed colleague. We must perform the sacred task to which we have dedicated ourselves." With Joe stumbling along behind, he left the saloon, crossed the clearing and entered the ship. As soon as they were inside, Joe dropped his murderous silence and cried: "What kind of a dirty trick was that, giving me poison instead of that snake oil?" "That was not poison," Harvey contradicted quietly. "It was La-anago Yergis extract, plus." "Plus what—arsenic?" "Now, Joseph! Consider my quandary when I came back here to manufacture our specific for all known ailments, with the intention of selling yonder asteroidal tin-horn a bill of medical goods—an entire case, mind you. Was I to mix the extract with the water for which we had been swindled to the tune of ten buckos a liter? Where would our profit have been, then? No; I had to use the bitter free water, of course." "But why use it on me?" Joe demanded furiously. Harvey looked reprovingly at his gangling partner. "Did Johnson ask to taste it, or did he not? One must look ahead, Joseph. I had to produce the same medicine that we will now manufacture. Thus, you were a guinea pig for a splendid cause." "Okay, okay," Joe said. "But you shoulda charged him more." "Joseph, I promise you that we shall get back every redsent of which that swindler cheated us, besides whatever other funds or valuables he possesses. We could not be content with less." "Well, we're starting all right," admitted Joe. "How about that thing with six arms? He looks like a valuable. Can't we grab him off?" Harvey stopped filling bottles and looked up pensively. "I have every hope of luring away the profitable monstrosity. Apparently you have also surmised the fortune we could make with him. At first I purpose to exhibit him on our interplanetary tours with our streamlined panacea; he would be a spectacular attraction for bucolic suckers. Later, a brief period of demonstrating his abilities on the audio-visiphone. Then our triumph—we shall sell him at a stupendous figure to the zoo!" Joe was still dazed by that monetary vista when he and Harvey carried the case of medicine to the saloon. The mayor had already cleared a place of honor in the cluttered back room, where he told them to put it down carefully. Then he took the elaborate bottle-opener Harvey gave him, reverently uncorked a bottle and sampled it. It must have been at least as good as the first; he gagged. "That's the stuff, all right," he said, swallowing hard. He counted out the money into Harvey's hand, at a moderate rate that precariously balanced between his pleasure at getting the fever remedy and his pain at paying for it. Then he glanced out to see the position of Jupiter, and asked: "You gents eaten yet? The restaurant's open now." Harvey and Joe looked at each other. They hadn't been thinking about food at all, but suddenly they realized that they were hungry. "It's only water we were short of," Harvey said apprehensively. "We've got rations back at the ship." " H-mph! " the mayor grunted. "Powdered concentrates. Compressed pap. Suit yourselves. We treat our stomachs better here. And you're welcome to our hospitality." "Your hospitality," said Harvey, "depends on the prices you charge." "Well, if that's what's worrying you, you can stop worrying," answered the mayor promptly. "What's more, the kind of dinner I serve here you can't get anywhere else for any price." Swiftly, Harvey conned the possibilities of being bilked again. He saw none. "Let's take a look at the menu, anyhow, Joe," he said guardedly. Johnson immediately fell into the role of "mine host." "Come right in, gents," he invited. "Right into the dining room." He seated them at a table, which a rope tied between posts made more or less private, though nobody else was in the saloon and there was little chance of company. Genius, the six-armed native, appeared from the dingy kitchen with two menus in one hand, two glasses of water in another, plus napkins, silverware, a pitcher, plates, saucers, cups, and their cocktails, which were on the house. Then he stood by for orders. Harvey and Joe studied the menu critically. The prices were phenomenally low. When they glanced up at Johnson in perplexity, he grinned, bowed and asked: "Everything satisfactory, gents?" "Quite," said Harvey. "We shall order." For an hour they were served amazing dishes, both fresh and canned, the culinary wealth of this planetoid and all the system. And the service was as extraordinary as the meal itself. With four hands, Genius played deftly upon a pair of mellow Venusian viotars , using his other two hands for waiting on the table. "We absolutely must purchase this incredible specimen," Harvey whispered excitedly when Johnson and the native were both in the kitchen, attending to the next course. "He would make any society hostess's season a riotous success, which should be worth a great sum to women like Mrs. van Schuyler-Morgan, merely for his hire." "Think of a fast one fast," Joe agreed. "You're right." "But I dislike having to revise my opinion of a man so often," complained Harvey. "I wish Johnson would stay either swindler or honest merchant. This dinner is worth as least twenty buckos, yet I estimate our check at a mere bucko twenty redsents." The mayor's appearance prevented them from continuing the discussion. "It's been a great honor, gents," he said. "Ain't often I have visitors, and I like the best, like you two gents." As if on cue, Genius came out and put the check down between Joe and Harvey. Harvey picked it up negligently, but his casual air vanished in a yelp of horror. "What the devil is this?" he shouted.—"How do you arrive at this fantastic, idiotic figure— three hundred and twenty-eight buckos !" Johnson didn't answer. Neither did Genius; he simply put on the table, not a fingerbowl, but a magnifying glass. With one of his thirty fingers he pointed politely to the bottom of the menu. Harvey focused on the microscopic print, and his face went pasty with rage. The minute note read: "Services and entertainment, 327 buckos 80 redsents." "You can go to hell!" Joe growled. "We won't pay it!" Johnson sighed ponderously. "I was afraid you'd act like that," he said with regret. He pulled a tin badge out of his rear pocket, pinned it on his vest, and twisted his holstered gun into view. "Afraid I'll have to ask the sheriff to take over." Johnson, the "sheriff," collected the money, and Johnson, the "restaurateur," pocketed it. Meanwhile, Harvey tipped Joe the sign to remain calm. "My friend," he said to the mayor, and his tones took on a schoolmasterish severity, "your long absence from Earth has perhaps made you forget those elements of human wisdom that have entered the folk-lore of your native planet. Such as, for example: 'It is folly to kill a goose that lays golden eggs,' and 'Penny wise is pound foolish.'" "I don't get the connection," objected Johnson. "Well, by obliging us to pay such a high price for your dinner, you put out of your reach the chance of profiting from a really substantial deal. My partner and I were prepared to make you a sizable offer for the peculiar creature you call Genius. But by reducing our funds the way you have—" "Who said I wanted to sell him?" the mayor interrupted. He rubbed his fingers together and asked disinterestedly: "What were you going to offer, anyhow?" "It doesn't matter any longer," Harvey said with elaborate carelessness. "Perhaps you wouldn't have accepted it, anyway." "That's right," Johnson came back emphatically. "But what would your offer have been which I would have turned down?" "Which one? The one we were going to make, or the one we can make now?" "Either one. It don't make no difference. Genius is too valuable to sell." "Oh, come now, Mr. Johnson. Don't tell me no amount of money would tempt you!" "Nope. But how much did you say?" "Ah, then you will consider releasing Genius!" "Well, I'll tell you something," said the mayor confidentially. "When you've got one thing, you've got one thing. But when you've got money, it's the same as having a lot of things. Because, if you've got money, you can buy this and that and this and that and—" "This and that," concluded Joe. "We'll give you five hundred buckos." "Now, gents!" Johnson remonstrated. "Why, six hundred would hardly—" "You haven't left us much money," Harvey put in. The mayor frowned. "All right, we'll split the difference. Make it five-fifty." Harvey was quick to pay out, for this was a genuine windfall. Then he stood up and admired the astonishing possession he had so inexpensively acquired. "I really hate to deprive you of this unique creature," he said to Johnson. "I should imagine you will be rather lonely, with only your filial mammoth to keep you company." "I sure will," Johnson confessed glumly. "I got pretty attached to Genius, and I'm going to miss him something awful." Harvey forcibly removed his eyes from the native, who was clearing off the table almost all at once. "My friend," he said, "we take your only solace, it is true, but in his place we can offer something no less amazing and instructive." The mayor's hand went protectively to his pocket. "What is it?" he asked with the suspicion of a man who has seen human nature at its worst and expects nothing better. "Joseph, get our most prized belonging from the communications room of the ship," Harvey instructed. To Johnson he explained: "You must see the wondrous instrument before its value can be appreciated. My partner will soon have it here for your astonishment." Joe's face grew as glum as Johnson's had been. "Aw, Harv," he protested, "do we have to sell it? And right when I thought we were getting the key!" "We must not be selfish, my boy," Harvey said nobly. "We have had our chance; now we must relinquish Fate to the hands of a man who might have more success than we. Go, Joseph. Bring it here." Unwillingly, Joe turned and shuffled out. On a larger and heavier world than Planetoid 42, Johnson's curiosity would probably have had weight and mass. He was bursting with questions, but he was obviously afraid they would cost him money. For his part, Harvey allowed that curiosity to grow like a Venusian amoeba until Joe came in, lugging a radio. "Is that what you were talking about?" the mayor snorted. "What makes you think I want a radio? I came here to get away from singers and political speech-makers." "Do not jump to hasty conclusions," Harvey cautioned. "Another word, and I shall refuse you the greatest opportunity any man has ever had, with the sole exceptions of Joseph, myself and the unfortunate inventor of this absolutely awe-inspiring device." "I ain't in the market for a radio," Johnson said stubbornly. Harvey nodded in relief. "We have attempted to repay our host, Joseph. He has spurned our generosity. We have now the chance to continue our study, which I am positive will soon reward us with the key to an enormous fortune." "Well, that's no plating off our bow," Joe grunted. "I'm glad he did turn it down. I hated to give it up after working on it for three whole years." He picked up the radio and began walking toward the door. "Now, hold on!" the mayor cried. "I ain't saying I'll buy, but what is it I'm turning down?" Joe returned and set the instrument down on the bar. His face sorrowful, Harvey fondly stroked the scarred plasticoid cabinet. "To make a long story, Mr. Johnson," he said, "Joseph and I were among the chosen few who knew the famous Doctor Dean intimately. Just before his tragic death, you will recall, Dean allegedly went insane." He banged his fist on the bar. "I have said it before, and I repeat again, that was a malicious lie, spread by the doctor's enemies to discredit his greatest invention—this fourth dimensional radio!" "This what?" Johnson blurted out. "In simple terms," clarified Harvey, "the ingenious doctor discovered that the yawning chasm between the dimensions could be bridged by energy of all quanta. There has never been any question that the inhabitants of the super-dimension would be far more civilized than ourselves. Consequently, the man who could tap their knowledge would find himself in possession of a powerful, undreamt-of science!" The mayor looked respectfully at the silent box on the bar. "And this thing gets broadcasts from the fourth dimension?" "It does, Mr. Johnson! Only charlatans like those who envied Doctor Dean's magnificent accomplishments could deny that fact." The mayor put his hands in his pockets, unswiveled one hip and stared thoughtfully at the battered cabinet. "Well, let's say it picks up fourth dimensional broadcasts," he conceded. "But how could you understand what they're saying? Folks up there wouldn't talk our language." Again Harvey smashed his fist down. "Do you dare to repeat the scurvy lie that broke Dean's spirit and drove him to suicide?" Johnson recoiled. "No—no, of course not . I mean, being up here, I naturally couldn't get all the details." "Naturally," Harvey agreed, mollified. "I'm sorry I lost my temper. But it is a matter of record that the doctor proved the broadcasts emanating from the super-dimension were in English! Why should that be so difficult to believe? Is it impossible that at one time there was communication between the dimensions, that the super-beings admired our language and adopted it in all its beauty, adding to it their own hyper-scientific trimmings?" "Why, I don't know," Johnson said in confusion. "For three years, Joseph and I lost sleep and hair, trying to detect the simple key that would translate the somewhat metamorphosed broadcasts into our primitive English. It eluded us. Even the doctor failed. But that was understandable; a sensitive soul like his could stand only so much. And the combination of ridicule and failure to solve the mystery caused him to take his own life." Johnson winced. "Is that what you want to unload on me?" "For a very good reason, sir. Patience is the virtue that will be rewarded with the key to these fourth dimensional broadcasts. A man who could devote his life to improving this lonely worldlet is obviously a person with unusual patience." "Yeah," the mayor said grudgingly, "I ain't exactly flighty." "Therefore, you are the man who could unravel the problem!" Johnson asked skeptically: "How about a sample first?" Harvey turned a knob on the face of the scarred radio. After several squeals of spatial figures, a smooth voice began: "There are omnious pleajes of moby-hailegs in sonmirand which, howgraismon, are notch to be donfured miss ellasellabell in either or both hagasanipaj, by all means. This does not refly, on the brother man, nat or mizzafil saces are denuded by this ossifaligo...." Harvey switched off the set determinedly. "Wait a minute!" Johnson begged. "I almost got it then!" "I dislike being commercial," said Harvey, "but this astounding device still belongs to us. Would we not be foolish to let you discover the clue before purchasing the right to do so?" The mayor nodded indecisively, looking at the radio with agonized longing. "How much do you want?" he asked unhappily. "One thousand buckos, and no haggling. I am not in the mood." Johnson opened his mouth to argue; then, seeing Harvey's set features, paid with the worst possible grace. "Don't you think we ought to tell him about the batteries, Harv?" Joe asked. "What about the batteries?" demanded Johnson with deadly calm. "A very small matter," Harvey said airily. "You see, we have been analyzing these broadcasts for three years. In that time, of course, the batteries are bound to weaken. I estimate these should last not less than one Terrestrial month, at the very least." "What do I do then?" Harvey shrugged. "Special batteries are required, which I see Joseph has by chance brought along. For the batteries, the only ones of their kind left in the system, I ask only what they cost—one hundred and ninety-nine buckos, no more and, on the other hand, no less." Johnson was breathing hard, and his hand hovered dangerously near his gun. But he paid the amount Harvey wanted. Moreover, he actually shook hands when the two panacea purveyors collected their six-armed prize and said goodbye. Before they were outside, however, he had turned on the radio and was listening tensely to a woman's highly cultured, though rather angry voice, saying: "Oh, you hannaforge are all beasa-taga-sanimort. If you rue amount it, how do you respench a pure woman to ansver go-samak—" "I'll get it!" they heard Johnson mutter. Then the sound of giant feet crossing the barroom floor reached their ears, and a shrill question: "What's that, Papa?" "A fortune, Jed! Those fakers are damned fools, selling us a thing like—" Joe gazed at Harvey admiringly. "Another one sold? Harv, that spiel pulls them in like an ether storm!" Together with the remarkable planetoid man, they reached the ship. Above them, dark, tumbling shapes blotted out the stars and silently moved on. Joe opened the gangway door. "Come on in, pal," he said to Genius. "We're shoving off." The planetoid man grinned foolishly. "Can't go arong with you," he said with an apologetic manner. "I rike to, but pressure fratten me out if I go." "What in solar blazes are you talking about?" Harvey asked. "I grow up on pranetoid," Genius explained. "On big pranet, too much pressure for me." The two salesmen looked narrowly at each other. "Did Johnson know that when he sold you?" Joe snarled. "Oh, sure." The silly grin became wider than ever. "Peopre from Earth buy me rots of times. I never reave pranetoid, though." "Joseph," Harvey said ominously, "that slick colonist has put one over upon us. What is our customary procedure in that event?" "We tear him apart," Joe replied between his teeth. "Not Mister Johnson," advised Genius. "Have gun and badge. He shoot you first and then rock you up in prison." Harvey paused, his ominous air vanishing. "True. There is also the fact, Joseph, that when he discovers the scrambled rectifier in the radio we sold him, he will have been paid back in full for his regrettable dishonesty." Unwillingly, Joe agreed. While Genius retreated to a safe distance, they entered the ship and blasted off. Within a few minutes the automatic steering pilot had maneuvered them above the plane of the asteroid belt. "I got kind of dizzy," Joe said, "there were so many deals back and forth. How much did we make on the sucker?" "A goodly amount, I wager," Harvey responded. He took out a pencil and paper. "Medicine, 469.50; radio, 1,000; batteries, 199. Total—let's see—1668 buckos and 50 redsents. A goodly sum, as I told you." He emptied his pockets of money, spread it out on the astrogation table and began counting. Finished, he looked up, troubled. "How much did we have when we landed, Joseph?" "Exactly 1668 buckos," Joe answered promptly. "I can't understand it," said Harvey. "Instead of double our capital, we now have only 1668 buckos and 50 redsents!" Feverishly, he returned to his pencil and paper. "Drinking water, 790; battery water, free; meal, 328; planetoid man, 550. Total: 1668 buckos!" He stared at the figures. "We paid out almost as much as we took in," he said bitterly. "Despite our intensive efforts, we made the absurd sum of fifty redsents." "Why, the dirty crook!" Joe growled. But after a few moments of sad reflection, Harvey became philosophical. "Perhaps, Joseph, we are more fortunate than we realize. We were, after all, completely in Johnson's power. The more I ponder, the more I believe we were lucky to escape. And, anyhow, we did make fifty redsents on the swindler. A moral victory, my boy." Joe, who had been sunk desparingly into a chair, now stood up slowly and asked: "Remember that bottle-opener we gave him?" "Certainly," Harvey explained. "What about it?" "How much did it cost us?" Harvey's eyebrows puckered. Suddenly he started laughing. "You're right, Joseph. We paid forty-six redsents for it on Venus. So, after all that transacting of business, we made four redsents!" "Four redsents, hell!" Joe snapped. "That was the sales tax!" He glared; then a smile lifted his mouth. "You remember those yokels on Mars' Flatlands, and the way they worshipped gold?" " Goldbricks! " Harvey said succinctly. Grinning, Joe set the robot-controls for Mars.

Describe the relationship between Harvey and Joe.

1

Harvey and Joe are business partners and conmen. Although they are both important players in their various ruses, Harvey is definitely the brains behind the operation. Joe is willing to listen to Harvey’s instructions and play along in order to get money out of their victims. However, he is also a bit more hot-headed than his partner, and it’s up to Harvey to calm Joe down when he gets flustered because they are taken advantage of. When Joe finds out about the sweet water that Johnson lied about, he is instantly irate. Later, when Johnson tricks them into ordering loads of food at his restaurant, Joe is furious and threatens not to pay the bill. In both instances, Harvey recognizes that the pair was fooled fair and square and all they can do is accept the loss. It is obvious that the two have been working together for a long time because they are able to communicate using very few words and gestures. They both know their playbook of tricks, and it is easy for each of the men to tip the other off to their thoughts. After meeting Genius, Harvey and Joe immediately agree that they should try and acquire the creature. Both men are money-minded and they see dollar signs when they lay their eyes on an alien as peculiar as him. When the duo wants to sell their medicine, Joe pretends to come down with symptoms of asteroid fever, and Harvey doesn’t miss a beat. Within moments he asks Joe if he’s feeling okay and goes to fetch the fake panacea that they peddle.

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Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net GRIFTERS' ASTEROID By H. L. GOLD Harvey and Joe were the slickest con-men ever to gyp a space-lane sucker. Or so they thought! Angus Johnson knew differently. He charged them five buckos for a glass of water—and got it! [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories May 1943. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Characteristically, Harvey Ellsworth tried to maintain his dignity, though his parched tongue was almost hanging out. But Joe Mallon, with no dignity to maintain, lurched across the rubbish-strewn patch of land that had been termed a spaceport. When Harvey staggered pontifically into the battered metalloy saloon—the only one on Planetoid 42—his tall, gangling partner was already stumbling out, mouthing something incoherent. They met in the doorway, violently. "We're delirious!" Joe cried. "It's a mirage!" "What is?" asked Harvey through a mouthful of cotton. Joe reeled aside, and Harvey saw what had upset his partner. He stared, speechless for once. In their hectic voyages from planet to planet, the pair of panacea purveyors had encountered the usual strange life-forms. But never had they seen anything like the amazing creature in that colonial saloon. Paying no attention to them, it was carrying a case of liquor in two hands, six siphons in two others, and a broom and dustpan in the remaining pair. The bartender, a big man resembling the plumpish Harvey in build, was leaning negligently on the counter, ordering this impossible being to fill the partly-emptied bottles, squeeze fruit juice and sweep the floor, all of which the native did simultaneously. "Nonsense," Harvey croaked uncertainly. "We have seen enough queer things to know there are always more." He led the way inside. Through thirst-cracked lips he rasped: "Water—quick!" Without a word, the bartender reached under the counter, brought out two glasses of water. The interplanetary con-men drank noisily, asked for more, until they had drunk eight glasses. Meanwhile, the bartender had taken out eight jiggers and filled them with whiskey. Harvey and Joe were breathing hard from having gulped the water so fast, but they were beginning to revive. They noticed the bartender's impersonal eyes studying them shrewdly. "Strangers, eh?" he asked at last. "Solar salesmen, my colonial friend," Harvey answered in his usual lush manner. "We purvey that renowned Martian remedy, La-anago Yergis , the formula for which was recently discovered by ourselves in the ancient ruined city of La-anago. Medical science is unanimous in proclaiming this magic medicine the sole panacea in the entire history of therapeutics." "Yeah?" said the bartender disinterestedly, polishing the chaser glasses without washing them. "Where you heading?" "Out of Mars for Ganymede. Our condenser broke down, and we've gone without water for five ghastly days." "Got a mechanic around this dumping ground you call a port?" Joe asked. "We did. He came near starving and moved on to Titan. Ships don't land here unless they're in trouble." "Then where's the water lead-in? We'll fill up and push off." "Mayor takes care of that," replied the saloon owner. "If you gents're finished at the bar, your drinks'll be forty buckos." Harvey grinned puzzledly. "We didn't take any whiskey." "Might as well. Water's five buckos a glass. Liquor's free with every chaser." Harvey's eyes bulged. Joe gulped. "That—that's robbery!" the lanky man managed to get out in a thin quaver. The barkeeper shrugged. "When there ain't many customers, you gotta make more on each one. Besides—" "Besides nothing!" Joe roared, finding his voice again. "You dirty crook—robbing poor spacemen! You—" "You dirty crook!" Joe roared. "Robbing honest spacemen!" Harvey nudged him warningly. "Easy, my boy, easy." He turned to the bartender apologetically. "Don't mind my friend. His adrenal glands are sometimes overactive. You were going to say—?" The round face of the barkeeper had assumed an aggrieved expression. "Folks are always thinkin' the other feller's out to do 'em," he said, shaking his head. "Lemme explain about the water here. It's bitter as some kinds of sin before it's purified. Have to bring it in with buckets and make it sweet. That takes time and labor. Waddya think—I was chargin' feller critters for water just out of devilment? I charge because I gotta." "Friend," said Harvey, taking out a wallet and counting off eight five-bucko bills, "here is your money. What's fair is fair, and you have put a different complexion on what seemed at first to be an unconscionable interjection of a middleman between Nature and man's thirst." The saloon man removed his dirty apron and came around the bar. "If that's an apology, I accept it. Now the mayor'll discuss filling your tanks. That's me. I'm also justice of the peace, official recorder, fire chief...." "And chief of police, no doubt," said Harvey jocosely. "Nope. That's my son, Jed. Angus Johnson's my name. Folks here just call me Chief. I run this town, and run it right. How much water will you need?" Joe estimated quickly. "About seventy-five liters, if we go on half rations," he answered. He waited apprehensively. "Let's say ten buckos a liter," the mayor said. "On account of the quantity, I'm able to quote a bargain price. Shucks, boys, it hurts me more to charge for water than it does for you to pay. I just got to, that's all." The mayor gestured to the native, who shuffled out to the tanks with them. The planetoid man worked the pump while the mayor intently watched the crude level-gauge, crying "Stop!" when it registered the proper amount. Then Johnson rubbed his thumb on his index finger and wetted his lips expectantly. Harvey bravely counted off the bills. He asked: "But what are we to do about replenishing our battery fluid? Ten buckos a liter would be preposterous. We simply can't afford it." Johnson's response almost floored them. "Who said anything about charging you for battery water? You can have all you want for nothing. It's just the purified stuff that comes so high." After giving them directions that would take them to the free-water pool, the ponderous factotum of Planetoid 42 shook hands and headed back to the saloon. His six-armed assistant followed him inside. "Now do you see, my hot-tempered colleague?" said Harvey as he and Joe picked up buckets that hung on the tank. "Johnson, as I saw instantly, is the victim of a difficult environment, and must charge accordingly." "Just the same," Joe griped, "paying for water isn't something you can get used to in ten minutes." In the fragile forest, they soon came across a stream that sprang from the igneous soil and splashed into the small pond whose contents, according to the mayor, was theirs for the asking. They filled their buckets and hauled them to the ship, then returned for more. It was on the sixth trip that Joe caught a glimpse of Jupiter-shine on a bright surface off to the left. The figure, 750, with the bucko sign in front of it, was still doing acrobatics inside his skull and keeping a faint suspicion alive in him. So he called Harvey and they went to investigate. Among the skimpy ground-crawling vines, they saw a long slender mound that was unmistakably a buried pipe. "What's this doing here?" Harvey asked, puzzled. "I thought Johnson had to transport water in pails." "Wonder where it leads to," Joe said uneasily. "It leads to the saloon," said Harvey, his eyes rapidly tracing the pipe back toward the spaceport. "What I am concerned with is where it leads from ." Five minutes later, panting heavily from the unaccustomed exertion of scrambling through the tangle of planetorial undergrowth, they burst into the open—before a clear, sparkling pool. Mutely, Harvey pointed out a pipe-end jutting under the water. "I am growing suspicious," he said in a rigidly controlled voice. But Joe was already on his knees, scooping up a handful of water and tasting it. "Sweet!" he snarled. They rushed back to the first pool, where Joe again tasted a sample. His mouth went wry. "Bitter! He uses only one pool, the sweet one! The only thing that needs purifying around here is that blasted mayor's conscience." "The asteroidal Poobah has tricked us with a slick come-on," said Harvey slowly. His eyes grew cold. "Joseph, the good-natured artist in me has become a hard and merciless avenger. I shall not rest until we have had the best of this colonial con-man! Watch your cues from this point hence." Fists clenched, the two returned to the saloon. But at the door they stopped and their fists unclenched. "Thought you gents were leaving," the mayor called out, seeing them frozen in the doorway. "Glad you didn't. Now you can meet my son, Jed. Him and me are the whole Earthman population of Johnson City." "You don't need any more," said Harvey, dismayed. Johnson's eight-foot son, topped by a massive roof of sun-bleached hair and held up by a foundation that seemed immovable, had obviously been born and raised in low gravity. For any decent-sized world would have kept him down near the general dimensions of a man. He held out an acre of palm. Harvey studied it worriedly, put his own hand somewhere on it, swallowed as it closed, then breathed again when his fingers were released in five units instead of a single compressed one. "Pleased to meet you," piped a voice that had never known a dense atmosphere. The pursuit of vengeance, Harvey realized, had taken a quick and unpleasant turn. Something shrewd was called for.... "Joseph!" he exclaimed, looking at his partner in alarm. "Don't you feel well?" Even before the others could turn to him, Joe's practiced eyes were gently crossing. He sagged against the door frame, all his features drooping like a bloodhound's. "Bring him in here!" Johnson cried. "I mean, get him away! He's coming down with asteroid fever!" "Of course," replied Harvey calmly. "Any fool knows the first symptoms of the disease that once scourged the universe." "What do you mean, once ?" demanded Johnson. "I come down with it every year, and I ain't hankering to have it in an off-season. Get him out of here!" "In good time. He can't be moved immediately." "Then he'll be here for months!" Harvey helped Joe to the counter and lifted him up on it. The mayor and his gigantic offspring were cowering across the room, trying to breathe in tiny, uncontaminating gasps. "You'll find everything you want in the back room," Johnson said frantically, "sulfopyridine, mustard plasters, rubs, inhalers, suction cups—" "Relics of the past," Harvey stated. "One medication is all modern man requires to combat the dread menace, asteroid fever." "What's that?" asked the mayor without conviction. Instead of replying, Harvey hurried outside to the ungainly second-hand rocket ship in the center of the shabby spaceport. He returned within a few minutes, carrying a bottle. Joe was still stretched out on the bar, panting, his eyes slowly crossing and uncrossing. Harvey lifted the patient's head tenderly, put the bottle to his lips and tilted it until he was forced to drink. When Joe tried to pull away, Harvey was inexorable. He made his partner drink until most of the liquid was gone. Then he stepped back and waited for the inevitable result. Joe's performance was better than ever. He lay supine for several moments, his face twisted into an expression that seemed doomed to perpetual wryness. Slowly, however, he sat up and his features straightened out. "Are—are you all right?" asked the mayor anxiously. "Much better," said Joe in a weak voice. "Maybe you need another dose," Harvey suggested. Joe recoiled. "I'm fine now!" he cried, and sprang off the bar to prove it. Astonished, Johnson and his son drew closer. They searched Joe's face, and then the mayor timidly felt his pulse. "Well, I'll be hanged!" Johnson ejaculated. " La-anago Yergis never fails, my friend," Harvey explained. "By actual test, it conquers asteroid fever in from four to twenty-three minutes, depending on the severity of the attack. Luckily, we caught this one before it grew formidable." The mayor's eyes became clouded mirrors of an inward conflict. "If you don't charge too much," he said warily, "I might think of buying some." "We do not sell this unbelievable remedy," Harvey replied with dignity. "It sells itself." "'Course, I'd expect a considerable reduction if I bought a whole case," said Johnson. "That would be the smallest investment you could make, compared with the vast loss of time and strength the fever involves." "How much?" asked the mayor unhappily. "For you, since you have taken us in so hospitably, a mere five hundred buckos." Johnson did not actually stagger back, but he gave the impression of doing so. "F-four hundred," he offered. "Not a red cent less than four seventy-five," Harvey said flatly. "Make it four fifty," quavered Johnson. "I dislike haggling," said Harvey. The final price, however, was four hundred and sixty-nine buckos and fifty redsents. Magnanimously, Harvey added: "And we will include, gratis , an elegant bottle-opener, a superb product of Mercurian handicraftsmanship." Johnson stabbed out a warning finger. "No tricks now. I want a taste of that stuff. You're not switching some worthless junk on me." Harvey took a glass from the bar and poured him a generous sample. The mayor sniffed it, grimaced, then threw it down his gullet. The ensuing minute saw a grim battle between a man and his stomach, a battle which the man gradually won. "There ain't no words for that taste," he gulped when it was safe to talk again. "Medicine," Harvey propounded, "should taste like medicine." To Joe he said: "Come, my esteemed colleague. We must perform the sacred task to which we have dedicated ourselves." With Joe stumbling along behind, he left the saloon, crossed the clearing and entered the ship. As soon as they were inside, Joe dropped his murderous silence and cried: "What kind of a dirty trick was that, giving me poison instead of that snake oil?" "That was not poison," Harvey contradicted quietly. "It was La-anago Yergis extract, plus." "Plus what—arsenic?" "Now, Joseph! Consider my quandary when I came back here to manufacture our specific for all known ailments, with the intention of selling yonder asteroidal tin-horn a bill of medical goods—an entire case, mind you. Was I to mix the extract with the water for which we had been swindled to the tune of ten buckos a liter? Where would our profit have been, then? No; I had to use the bitter free water, of course." "But why use it on me?" Joe demanded furiously. Harvey looked reprovingly at his gangling partner. "Did Johnson ask to taste it, or did he not? One must look ahead, Joseph. I had to produce the same medicine that we will now manufacture. Thus, you were a guinea pig for a splendid cause." "Okay, okay," Joe said. "But you shoulda charged him more." "Joseph, I promise you that we shall get back every redsent of which that swindler cheated us, besides whatever other funds or valuables he possesses. We could not be content with less." "Well, we're starting all right," admitted Joe. "How about that thing with six arms? He looks like a valuable. Can't we grab him off?" Harvey stopped filling bottles and looked up pensively. "I have every hope of luring away the profitable monstrosity. Apparently you have also surmised the fortune we could make with him. At first I purpose to exhibit him on our interplanetary tours with our streamlined panacea; he would be a spectacular attraction for bucolic suckers. Later, a brief period of demonstrating his abilities on the audio-visiphone. Then our triumph—we shall sell him at a stupendous figure to the zoo!" Joe was still dazed by that monetary vista when he and Harvey carried the case of medicine to the saloon. The mayor had already cleared a place of honor in the cluttered back room, where he told them to put it down carefully. Then he took the elaborate bottle-opener Harvey gave him, reverently uncorked a bottle and sampled it. It must have been at least as good as the first; he gagged. "That's the stuff, all right," he said, swallowing hard. He counted out the money into Harvey's hand, at a moderate rate that precariously balanced between his pleasure at getting the fever remedy and his pain at paying for it. Then he glanced out to see the position of Jupiter, and asked: "You gents eaten yet? The restaurant's open now." Harvey and Joe looked at each other. They hadn't been thinking about food at all, but suddenly they realized that they were hungry. "It's only water we were short of," Harvey said apprehensively. "We've got rations back at the ship." " H-mph! " the mayor grunted. "Powdered concentrates. Compressed pap. Suit yourselves. We treat our stomachs better here. And you're welcome to our hospitality." "Your hospitality," said Harvey, "depends on the prices you charge." "Well, if that's what's worrying you, you can stop worrying," answered the mayor promptly. "What's more, the kind of dinner I serve here you can't get anywhere else for any price." Swiftly, Harvey conned the possibilities of being bilked again. He saw none. "Let's take a look at the menu, anyhow, Joe," he said guardedly. Johnson immediately fell into the role of "mine host." "Come right in, gents," he invited. "Right into the dining room." He seated them at a table, which a rope tied between posts made more or less private, though nobody else was in the saloon and there was little chance of company. Genius, the six-armed native, appeared from the dingy kitchen with two menus in one hand, two glasses of water in another, plus napkins, silverware, a pitcher, plates, saucers, cups, and their cocktails, which were on the house. Then he stood by for orders. Harvey and Joe studied the menu critically. The prices were phenomenally low. When they glanced up at Johnson in perplexity, he grinned, bowed and asked: "Everything satisfactory, gents?" "Quite," said Harvey. "We shall order." For an hour they were served amazing dishes, both fresh and canned, the culinary wealth of this planetoid and all the system. And the service was as extraordinary as the meal itself. With four hands, Genius played deftly upon a pair of mellow Venusian viotars , using his other two hands for waiting on the table. "We absolutely must purchase this incredible specimen," Harvey whispered excitedly when Johnson and the native were both in the kitchen, attending to the next course. "He would make any society hostess's season a riotous success, which should be worth a great sum to women like Mrs. van Schuyler-Morgan, merely for his hire." "Think of a fast one fast," Joe agreed. "You're right." "But I dislike having to revise my opinion of a man so often," complained Harvey. "I wish Johnson would stay either swindler or honest merchant. This dinner is worth as least twenty buckos, yet I estimate our check at a mere bucko twenty redsents." The mayor's appearance prevented them from continuing the discussion. "It's been a great honor, gents," he said. "Ain't often I have visitors, and I like the best, like you two gents." As if on cue, Genius came out and put the check down between Joe and Harvey. Harvey picked it up negligently, but his casual air vanished in a yelp of horror. "What the devil is this?" he shouted.—"How do you arrive at this fantastic, idiotic figure— three hundred and twenty-eight buckos !" Johnson didn't answer. Neither did Genius; he simply put on the table, not a fingerbowl, but a magnifying glass. With one of his thirty fingers he pointed politely to the bottom of the menu. Harvey focused on the microscopic print, and his face went pasty with rage. The minute note read: "Services and entertainment, 327 buckos 80 redsents." "You can go to hell!" Joe growled. "We won't pay it!" Johnson sighed ponderously. "I was afraid you'd act like that," he said with regret. He pulled a tin badge out of his rear pocket, pinned it on his vest, and twisted his holstered gun into view. "Afraid I'll have to ask the sheriff to take over." Johnson, the "sheriff," collected the money, and Johnson, the "restaurateur," pocketed it. Meanwhile, Harvey tipped Joe the sign to remain calm. "My friend," he said to the mayor, and his tones took on a schoolmasterish severity, "your long absence from Earth has perhaps made you forget those elements of human wisdom that have entered the folk-lore of your native planet. Such as, for example: 'It is folly to kill a goose that lays golden eggs,' and 'Penny wise is pound foolish.'" "I don't get the connection," objected Johnson. "Well, by obliging us to pay such a high price for your dinner, you put out of your reach the chance of profiting from a really substantial deal. My partner and I were prepared to make you a sizable offer for the peculiar creature you call Genius. But by reducing our funds the way you have—" "Who said I wanted to sell him?" the mayor interrupted. He rubbed his fingers together and asked disinterestedly: "What were you going to offer, anyhow?" "It doesn't matter any longer," Harvey said with elaborate carelessness. "Perhaps you wouldn't have accepted it, anyway." "That's right," Johnson came back emphatically. "But what would your offer have been which I would have turned down?" "Which one? The one we were going to make, or the one we can make now?" "Either one. It don't make no difference. Genius is too valuable to sell." "Oh, come now, Mr. Johnson. Don't tell me no amount of money would tempt you!" "Nope. But how much did you say?" "Ah, then you will consider releasing Genius!" "Well, I'll tell you something," said the mayor confidentially. "When you've got one thing, you've got one thing. But when you've got money, it's the same as having a lot of things. Because, if you've got money, you can buy this and that and this and that and—" "This and that," concluded Joe. "We'll give you five hundred buckos." "Now, gents!" Johnson remonstrated. "Why, six hundred would hardly—" "You haven't left us much money," Harvey put in. The mayor frowned. "All right, we'll split the difference. Make it five-fifty." Harvey was quick to pay out, for this was a genuine windfall. Then he stood up and admired the astonishing possession he had so inexpensively acquired. "I really hate to deprive you of this unique creature," he said to Johnson. "I should imagine you will be rather lonely, with only your filial mammoth to keep you company." "I sure will," Johnson confessed glumly. "I got pretty attached to Genius, and I'm going to miss him something awful." Harvey forcibly removed his eyes from the native, who was clearing off the table almost all at once. "My friend," he said, "we take your only solace, it is true, but in his place we can offer something no less amazing and instructive." The mayor's hand went protectively to his pocket. "What is it?" he asked with the suspicion of a man who has seen human nature at its worst and expects nothing better. "Joseph, get our most prized belonging from the communications room of the ship," Harvey instructed. To Johnson he explained: "You must see the wondrous instrument before its value can be appreciated. My partner will soon have it here for your astonishment." Joe's face grew as glum as Johnson's had been. "Aw, Harv," he protested, "do we have to sell it? And right when I thought we were getting the key!" "We must not be selfish, my boy," Harvey said nobly. "We have had our chance; now we must relinquish Fate to the hands of a man who might have more success than we. Go, Joseph. Bring it here." Unwillingly, Joe turned and shuffled out. On a larger and heavier world than Planetoid 42, Johnson's curiosity would probably have had weight and mass. He was bursting with questions, but he was obviously afraid they would cost him money. For his part, Harvey allowed that curiosity to grow like a Venusian amoeba until Joe came in, lugging a radio. "Is that what you were talking about?" the mayor snorted. "What makes you think I want a radio? I came here to get away from singers and political speech-makers." "Do not jump to hasty conclusions," Harvey cautioned. "Another word, and I shall refuse you the greatest opportunity any man has ever had, with the sole exceptions of Joseph, myself and the unfortunate inventor of this absolutely awe-inspiring device." "I ain't in the market for a radio," Johnson said stubbornly. Harvey nodded in relief. "We have attempted to repay our host, Joseph. He has spurned our generosity. We have now the chance to continue our study, which I am positive will soon reward us with the key to an enormous fortune." "Well, that's no plating off our bow," Joe grunted. "I'm glad he did turn it down. I hated to give it up after working on it for three whole years." He picked up the radio and began walking toward the door. "Now, hold on!" the mayor cried. "I ain't saying I'll buy, but what is it I'm turning down?" Joe returned and set the instrument down on the bar. His face sorrowful, Harvey fondly stroked the scarred plasticoid cabinet. "To make a long story, Mr. Johnson," he said, "Joseph and I were among the chosen few who knew the famous Doctor Dean intimately. Just before his tragic death, you will recall, Dean allegedly went insane." He banged his fist on the bar. "I have said it before, and I repeat again, that was a malicious lie, spread by the doctor's enemies to discredit his greatest invention—this fourth dimensional radio!" "This what?" Johnson blurted out. "In simple terms," clarified Harvey, "the ingenious doctor discovered that the yawning chasm between the dimensions could be bridged by energy of all quanta. There has never been any question that the inhabitants of the super-dimension would be far more civilized than ourselves. Consequently, the man who could tap their knowledge would find himself in possession of a powerful, undreamt-of science!" The mayor looked respectfully at the silent box on the bar. "And this thing gets broadcasts from the fourth dimension?" "It does, Mr. Johnson! Only charlatans like those who envied Doctor Dean's magnificent accomplishments could deny that fact." The mayor put his hands in his pockets, unswiveled one hip and stared thoughtfully at the battered cabinet. "Well, let's say it picks up fourth dimensional broadcasts," he conceded. "But how could you understand what they're saying? Folks up there wouldn't talk our language." Again Harvey smashed his fist down. "Do you dare to repeat the scurvy lie that broke Dean's spirit and drove him to suicide?" Johnson recoiled. "No—no, of course not . I mean, being up here, I naturally couldn't get all the details." "Naturally," Harvey agreed, mollified. "I'm sorry I lost my temper. But it is a matter of record that the doctor proved the broadcasts emanating from the super-dimension were in English! Why should that be so difficult to believe? Is it impossible that at one time there was communication between the dimensions, that the super-beings admired our language and adopted it in all its beauty, adding to it their own hyper-scientific trimmings?" "Why, I don't know," Johnson said in confusion. "For three years, Joseph and I lost sleep and hair, trying to detect the simple key that would translate the somewhat metamorphosed broadcasts into our primitive English. It eluded us. Even the doctor failed. But that was understandable; a sensitive soul like his could stand only so much. And the combination of ridicule and failure to solve the mystery caused him to take his own life." Johnson winced. "Is that what you want to unload on me?" "For a very good reason, sir. Patience is the virtue that will be rewarded with the key to these fourth dimensional broadcasts. A man who could devote his life to improving this lonely worldlet is obviously a person with unusual patience." "Yeah," the mayor said grudgingly, "I ain't exactly flighty." "Therefore, you are the man who could unravel the problem!" Johnson asked skeptically: "How about a sample first?" Harvey turned a knob on the face of the scarred radio. After several squeals of spatial figures, a smooth voice began: "There are omnious pleajes of moby-hailegs in sonmirand which, howgraismon, are notch to be donfured miss ellasellabell in either or both hagasanipaj, by all means. This does not refly, on the brother man, nat or mizzafil saces are denuded by this ossifaligo...." Harvey switched off the set determinedly. "Wait a minute!" Johnson begged. "I almost got it then!" "I dislike being commercial," said Harvey, "but this astounding device still belongs to us. Would we not be foolish to let you discover the clue before purchasing the right to do so?" The mayor nodded indecisively, looking at the radio with agonized longing. "How much do you want?" he asked unhappily. "One thousand buckos, and no haggling. I am not in the mood." Johnson opened his mouth to argue; then, seeing Harvey's set features, paid with the worst possible grace. "Don't you think we ought to tell him about the batteries, Harv?" Joe asked. "What about the batteries?" demanded Johnson with deadly calm. "A very small matter," Harvey said airily. "You see, we have been analyzing these broadcasts for three years. In that time, of course, the batteries are bound to weaken. I estimate these should last not less than one Terrestrial month, at the very least." "What do I do then?" Harvey shrugged. "Special batteries are required, which I see Joseph has by chance brought along. For the batteries, the only ones of their kind left in the system, I ask only what they cost—one hundred and ninety-nine buckos, no more and, on the other hand, no less." Johnson was breathing hard, and his hand hovered dangerously near his gun. But he paid the amount Harvey wanted. Moreover, he actually shook hands when the two panacea purveyors collected their six-armed prize and said goodbye. Before they were outside, however, he had turned on the radio and was listening tensely to a woman's highly cultured, though rather angry voice, saying: "Oh, you hannaforge are all beasa-taga-sanimort. If you rue amount it, how do you respench a pure woman to ansver go-samak—" "I'll get it!" they heard Johnson mutter. Then the sound of giant feet crossing the barroom floor reached their ears, and a shrill question: "What's that, Papa?" "A fortune, Jed! Those fakers are damned fools, selling us a thing like—" Joe gazed at Harvey admiringly. "Another one sold? Harv, that spiel pulls them in like an ether storm!" Together with the remarkable planetoid man, they reached the ship. Above them, dark, tumbling shapes blotted out the stars and silently moved on. Joe opened the gangway door. "Come on in, pal," he said to Genius. "We're shoving off." The planetoid man grinned foolishly. "Can't go arong with you," he said with an apologetic manner. "I rike to, but pressure fratten me out if I go." "What in solar blazes are you talking about?" Harvey asked. "I grow up on pranetoid," Genius explained. "On big pranet, too much pressure for me." The two salesmen looked narrowly at each other. "Did Johnson know that when he sold you?" Joe snarled. "Oh, sure." The silly grin became wider than ever. "Peopre from Earth buy me rots of times. I never reave pranetoid, though." "Joseph," Harvey said ominously, "that slick colonist has put one over upon us. What is our customary procedure in that event?" "We tear him apart," Joe replied between his teeth. "Not Mister Johnson," advised Genius. "Have gun and badge. He shoot you first and then rock you up in prison." Harvey paused, his ominous air vanishing. "True. There is also the fact, Joseph, that when he discovers the scrambled rectifier in the radio we sold him, he will have been paid back in full for his regrettable dishonesty." Unwillingly, Joe agreed. While Genius retreated to a safe distance, they entered the ship and blasted off. Within a few minutes the automatic steering pilot had maneuvered them above the plane of the asteroid belt. "I got kind of dizzy," Joe said, "there were so many deals back and forth. How much did we make on the sucker?" "A goodly amount, I wager," Harvey responded. He took out a pencil and paper. "Medicine, 469.50; radio, 1,000; batteries, 199. Total—let's see—1668 buckos and 50 redsents. A goodly sum, as I told you." He emptied his pockets of money, spread it out on the astrogation table and began counting. Finished, he looked up, troubled. "How much did we have when we landed, Joseph?" "Exactly 1668 buckos," Joe answered promptly. "I can't understand it," said Harvey. "Instead of double our capital, we now have only 1668 buckos and 50 redsents!" Feverishly, he returned to his pencil and paper. "Drinking water, 790; battery water, free; meal, 328; planetoid man, 550. Total: 1668 buckos!" He stared at the figures. "We paid out almost as much as we took in," he said bitterly. "Despite our intensive efforts, we made the absurd sum of fifty redsents." "Why, the dirty crook!" Joe growled. But after a few moments of sad reflection, Harvey became philosophical. "Perhaps, Joseph, we are more fortunate than we realize. We were, after all, completely in Johnson's power. The more I ponder, the more I believe we were lucky to escape. And, anyhow, we did make fifty redsents on the swindler. A moral victory, my boy." Joe, who had been sunk desparingly into a chair, now stood up slowly and asked: "Remember that bottle-opener we gave him?" "Certainly," Harvey explained. "What about it?" "How much did it cost us?" Harvey's eyebrows puckered. Suddenly he started laughing. "You're right, Joseph. We paid forty-six redsents for it on Venus. So, after all that transacting of business, we made four redsents!" "Four redsents, hell!" Joe snapped. "That was the sales tax!" He glared; then a smile lifted his mouth. "You remember those yokels on Mars' Flatlands, and the way they worshipped gold?" " Goldbricks! " Harvey said succinctly. Grinning, Joe set the robot-controls for Mars.

Describe the relationship between Harvey and Joe.

5

Harvey and Joe are conmen and partners. They work together to deceive and swindle people out of their money using various schemes. Harvey is a fast-talker and smooth operator. Joe is more emotionally charged and tends to complain to Harvey often about the state of affairs they find themselves in. Joe often questions Harvey's approach but falls in line in order to execute his plan. Even though they work well together, they also fall prey to the deceptions that are set up by Johnson.

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Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net GRIFTERS' ASTEROID By H. L. GOLD Harvey and Joe were the slickest con-men ever to gyp a space-lane sucker. Or so they thought! Angus Johnson knew differently. He charged them five buckos for a glass of water—and got it! [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories May 1943. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Characteristically, Harvey Ellsworth tried to maintain his dignity, though his parched tongue was almost hanging out. But Joe Mallon, with no dignity to maintain, lurched across the rubbish-strewn patch of land that had been termed a spaceport. When Harvey staggered pontifically into the battered metalloy saloon—the only one on Planetoid 42—his tall, gangling partner was already stumbling out, mouthing something incoherent. They met in the doorway, violently. "We're delirious!" Joe cried. "It's a mirage!" "What is?" asked Harvey through a mouthful of cotton. Joe reeled aside, and Harvey saw what had upset his partner. He stared, speechless for once. In their hectic voyages from planet to planet, the pair of panacea purveyors had encountered the usual strange life-forms. But never had they seen anything like the amazing creature in that colonial saloon. Paying no attention to them, it was carrying a case of liquor in two hands, six siphons in two others, and a broom and dustpan in the remaining pair. The bartender, a big man resembling the plumpish Harvey in build, was leaning negligently on the counter, ordering this impossible being to fill the partly-emptied bottles, squeeze fruit juice and sweep the floor, all of which the native did simultaneously. "Nonsense," Harvey croaked uncertainly. "We have seen enough queer things to know there are always more." He led the way inside. Through thirst-cracked lips he rasped: "Water—quick!" Without a word, the bartender reached under the counter, brought out two glasses of water. The interplanetary con-men drank noisily, asked for more, until they had drunk eight glasses. Meanwhile, the bartender had taken out eight jiggers and filled them with whiskey. Harvey and Joe were breathing hard from having gulped the water so fast, but they were beginning to revive. They noticed the bartender's impersonal eyes studying them shrewdly. "Strangers, eh?" he asked at last. "Solar salesmen, my colonial friend," Harvey answered in his usual lush manner. "We purvey that renowned Martian remedy, La-anago Yergis , the formula for which was recently discovered by ourselves in the ancient ruined city of La-anago. Medical science is unanimous in proclaiming this magic medicine the sole panacea in the entire history of therapeutics." "Yeah?" said the bartender disinterestedly, polishing the chaser glasses without washing them. "Where you heading?" "Out of Mars for Ganymede. Our condenser broke down, and we've gone without water for five ghastly days." "Got a mechanic around this dumping ground you call a port?" Joe asked. "We did. He came near starving and moved on to Titan. Ships don't land here unless they're in trouble." "Then where's the water lead-in? We'll fill up and push off." "Mayor takes care of that," replied the saloon owner. "If you gents're finished at the bar, your drinks'll be forty buckos." Harvey grinned puzzledly. "We didn't take any whiskey." "Might as well. Water's five buckos a glass. Liquor's free with every chaser." Harvey's eyes bulged. Joe gulped. "That—that's robbery!" the lanky man managed to get out in a thin quaver. The barkeeper shrugged. "When there ain't many customers, you gotta make more on each one. Besides—" "Besides nothing!" Joe roared, finding his voice again. "You dirty crook—robbing poor spacemen! You—" "You dirty crook!" Joe roared. "Robbing honest spacemen!" Harvey nudged him warningly. "Easy, my boy, easy." He turned to the bartender apologetically. "Don't mind my friend. His adrenal glands are sometimes overactive. You were going to say—?" The round face of the barkeeper had assumed an aggrieved expression. "Folks are always thinkin' the other feller's out to do 'em," he said, shaking his head. "Lemme explain about the water here. It's bitter as some kinds of sin before it's purified. Have to bring it in with buckets and make it sweet. That takes time and labor. Waddya think—I was chargin' feller critters for water just out of devilment? I charge because I gotta." "Friend," said Harvey, taking out a wallet and counting off eight five-bucko bills, "here is your money. What's fair is fair, and you have put a different complexion on what seemed at first to be an unconscionable interjection of a middleman between Nature and man's thirst." The saloon man removed his dirty apron and came around the bar. "If that's an apology, I accept it. Now the mayor'll discuss filling your tanks. That's me. I'm also justice of the peace, official recorder, fire chief...." "And chief of police, no doubt," said Harvey jocosely. "Nope. That's my son, Jed. Angus Johnson's my name. Folks here just call me Chief. I run this town, and run it right. How much water will you need?" Joe estimated quickly. "About seventy-five liters, if we go on half rations," he answered. He waited apprehensively. "Let's say ten buckos a liter," the mayor said. "On account of the quantity, I'm able to quote a bargain price. Shucks, boys, it hurts me more to charge for water than it does for you to pay. I just got to, that's all." The mayor gestured to the native, who shuffled out to the tanks with them. The planetoid man worked the pump while the mayor intently watched the crude level-gauge, crying "Stop!" when it registered the proper amount. Then Johnson rubbed his thumb on his index finger and wetted his lips expectantly. Harvey bravely counted off the bills. He asked: "But what are we to do about replenishing our battery fluid? Ten buckos a liter would be preposterous. We simply can't afford it." Johnson's response almost floored them. "Who said anything about charging you for battery water? You can have all you want for nothing. It's just the purified stuff that comes so high." After giving them directions that would take them to the free-water pool, the ponderous factotum of Planetoid 42 shook hands and headed back to the saloon. His six-armed assistant followed him inside. "Now do you see, my hot-tempered colleague?" said Harvey as he and Joe picked up buckets that hung on the tank. "Johnson, as I saw instantly, is the victim of a difficult environment, and must charge accordingly." "Just the same," Joe griped, "paying for water isn't something you can get used to in ten minutes." In the fragile forest, they soon came across a stream that sprang from the igneous soil and splashed into the small pond whose contents, according to the mayor, was theirs for the asking. They filled their buckets and hauled them to the ship, then returned for more. It was on the sixth trip that Joe caught a glimpse of Jupiter-shine on a bright surface off to the left. The figure, 750, with the bucko sign in front of it, was still doing acrobatics inside his skull and keeping a faint suspicion alive in him. So he called Harvey and they went to investigate. Among the skimpy ground-crawling vines, they saw a long slender mound that was unmistakably a buried pipe. "What's this doing here?" Harvey asked, puzzled. "I thought Johnson had to transport water in pails." "Wonder where it leads to," Joe said uneasily. "It leads to the saloon," said Harvey, his eyes rapidly tracing the pipe back toward the spaceport. "What I am concerned with is where it leads from ." Five minutes later, panting heavily from the unaccustomed exertion of scrambling through the tangle of planetorial undergrowth, they burst into the open—before a clear, sparkling pool. Mutely, Harvey pointed out a pipe-end jutting under the water. "I am growing suspicious," he said in a rigidly controlled voice. But Joe was already on his knees, scooping up a handful of water and tasting it. "Sweet!" he snarled. They rushed back to the first pool, where Joe again tasted a sample. His mouth went wry. "Bitter! He uses only one pool, the sweet one! The only thing that needs purifying around here is that blasted mayor's conscience." "The asteroidal Poobah has tricked us with a slick come-on," said Harvey slowly. His eyes grew cold. "Joseph, the good-natured artist in me has become a hard and merciless avenger. I shall not rest until we have had the best of this colonial con-man! Watch your cues from this point hence." Fists clenched, the two returned to the saloon. But at the door they stopped and their fists unclenched. "Thought you gents were leaving," the mayor called out, seeing them frozen in the doorway. "Glad you didn't. Now you can meet my son, Jed. Him and me are the whole Earthman population of Johnson City." "You don't need any more," said Harvey, dismayed. Johnson's eight-foot son, topped by a massive roof of sun-bleached hair and held up by a foundation that seemed immovable, had obviously been born and raised in low gravity. For any decent-sized world would have kept him down near the general dimensions of a man. He held out an acre of palm. Harvey studied it worriedly, put his own hand somewhere on it, swallowed as it closed, then breathed again when his fingers were released in five units instead of a single compressed one. "Pleased to meet you," piped a voice that had never known a dense atmosphere. The pursuit of vengeance, Harvey realized, had taken a quick and unpleasant turn. Something shrewd was called for.... "Joseph!" he exclaimed, looking at his partner in alarm. "Don't you feel well?" Even before the others could turn to him, Joe's practiced eyes were gently crossing. He sagged against the door frame, all his features drooping like a bloodhound's. "Bring him in here!" Johnson cried. "I mean, get him away! He's coming down with asteroid fever!" "Of course," replied Harvey calmly. "Any fool knows the first symptoms of the disease that once scourged the universe." "What do you mean, once ?" demanded Johnson. "I come down with it every year, and I ain't hankering to have it in an off-season. Get him out of here!" "In good time. He can't be moved immediately." "Then he'll be here for months!" Harvey helped Joe to the counter and lifted him up on it. The mayor and his gigantic offspring were cowering across the room, trying to breathe in tiny, uncontaminating gasps. "You'll find everything you want in the back room," Johnson said frantically, "sulfopyridine, mustard plasters, rubs, inhalers, suction cups—" "Relics of the past," Harvey stated. "One medication is all modern man requires to combat the dread menace, asteroid fever." "What's that?" asked the mayor without conviction. Instead of replying, Harvey hurried outside to the ungainly second-hand rocket ship in the center of the shabby spaceport. He returned within a few minutes, carrying a bottle. Joe was still stretched out on the bar, panting, his eyes slowly crossing and uncrossing. Harvey lifted the patient's head tenderly, put the bottle to his lips and tilted it until he was forced to drink. When Joe tried to pull away, Harvey was inexorable. He made his partner drink until most of the liquid was gone. Then he stepped back and waited for the inevitable result. Joe's performance was better than ever. He lay supine for several moments, his face twisted into an expression that seemed doomed to perpetual wryness. Slowly, however, he sat up and his features straightened out. "Are—are you all right?" asked the mayor anxiously. "Much better," said Joe in a weak voice. "Maybe you need another dose," Harvey suggested. Joe recoiled. "I'm fine now!" he cried, and sprang off the bar to prove it. Astonished, Johnson and his son drew closer. They searched Joe's face, and then the mayor timidly felt his pulse. "Well, I'll be hanged!" Johnson ejaculated. " La-anago Yergis never fails, my friend," Harvey explained. "By actual test, it conquers asteroid fever in from four to twenty-three minutes, depending on the severity of the attack. Luckily, we caught this one before it grew formidable." The mayor's eyes became clouded mirrors of an inward conflict. "If you don't charge too much," he said warily, "I might think of buying some." "We do not sell this unbelievable remedy," Harvey replied with dignity. "It sells itself." "'Course, I'd expect a considerable reduction if I bought a whole case," said Johnson. "That would be the smallest investment you could make, compared with the vast loss of time and strength the fever involves." "How much?" asked the mayor unhappily. "For you, since you have taken us in so hospitably, a mere five hundred buckos." Johnson did not actually stagger back, but he gave the impression of doing so. "F-four hundred," he offered. "Not a red cent less than four seventy-five," Harvey said flatly. "Make it four fifty," quavered Johnson. "I dislike haggling," said Harvey. The final price, however, was four hundred and sixty-nine buckos and fifty redsents. Magnanimously, Harvey added: "And we will include, gratis , an elegant bottle-opener, a superb product of Mercurian handicraftsmanship." Johnson stabbed out a warning finger. "No tricks now. I want a taste of that stuff. You're not switching some worthless junk on me." Harvey took a glass from the bar and poured him a generous sample. The mayor sniffed it, grimaced, then threw it down his gullet. The ensuing minute saw a grim battle between a man and his stomach, a battle which the man gradually won. "There ain't no words for that taste," he gulped when it was safe to talk again. "Medicine," Harvey propounded, "should taste like medicine." To Joe he said: "Come, my esteemed colleague. We must perform the sacred task to which we have dedicated ourselves." With Joe stumbling along behind, he left the saloon, crossed the clearing and entered the ship. As soon as they were inside, Joe dropped his murderous silence and cried: "What kind of a dirty trick was that, giving me poison instead of that snake oil?" "That was not poison," Harvey contradicted quietly. "It was La-anago Yergis extract, plus." "Plus what—arsenic?" "Now, Joseph! Consider my quandary when I came back here to manufacture our specific for all known ailments, with the intention of selling yonder asteroidal tin-horn a bill of medical goods—an entire case, mind you. Was I to mix the extract with the water for which we had been swindled to the tune of ten buckos a liter? Where would our profit have been, then? No; I had to use the bitter free water, of course." "But why use it on me?" Joe demanded furiously. Harvey looked reprovingly at his gangling partner. "Did Johnson ask to taste it, or did he not? One must look ahead, Joseph. I had to produce the same medicine that we will now manufacture. Thus, you were a guinea pig for a splendid cause." "Okay, okay," Joe said. "But you shoulda charged him more." "Joseph, I promise you that we shall get back every redsent of which that swindler cheated us, besides whatever other funds or valuables he possesses. We could not be content with less." "Well, we're starting all right," admitted Joe. "How about that thing with six arms? He looks like a valuable. Can't we grab him off?" Harvey stopped filling bottles and looked up pensively. "I have every hope of luring away the profitable monstrosity. Apparently you have also surmised the fortune we could make with him. At first I purpose to exhibit him on our interplanetary tours with our streamlined panacea; he would be a spectacular attraction for bucolic suckers. Later, a brief period of demonstrating his abilities on the audio-visiphone. Then our triumph—we shall sell him at a stupendous figure to the zoo!" Joe was still dazed by that monetary vista when he and Harvey carried the case of medicine to the saloon. The mayor had already cleared a place of honor in the cluttered back room, where he told them to put it down carefully. Then he took the elaborate bottle-opener Harvey gave him, reverently uncorked a bottle and sampled it. It must have been at least as good as the first; he gagged. "That's the stuff, all right," he said, swallowing hard. He counted out the money into Harvey's hand, at a moderate rate that precariously balanced between his pleasure at getting the fever remedy and his pain at paying for it. Then he glanced out to see the position of Jupiter, and asked: "You gents eaten yet? The restaurant's open now." Harvey and Joe looked at each other. They hadn't been thinking about food at all, but suddenly they realized that they were hungry. "It's only water we were short of," Harvey said apprehensively. "We've got rations back at the ship." " H-mph! " the mayor grunted. "Powdered concentrates. Compressed pap. Suit yourselves. We treat our stomachs better here. And you're welcome to our hospitality." "Your hospitality," said Harvey, "depends on the prices you charge." "Well, if that's what's worrying you, you can stop worrying," answered the mayor promptly. "What's more, the kind of dinner I serve here you can't get anywhere else for any price." Swiftly, Harvey conned the possibilities of being bilked again. He saw none. "Let's take a look at the menu, anyhow, Joe," he said guardedly. Johnson immediately fell into the role of "mine host." "Come right in, gents," he invited. "Right into the dining room." He seated them at a table, which a rope tied between posts made more or less private, though nobody else was in the saloon and there was little chance of company. Genius, the six-armed native, appeared from the dingy kitchen with two menus in one hand, two glasses of water in another, plus napkins, silverware, a pitcher, plates, saucers, cups, and their cocktails, which were on the house. Then he stood by for orders. Harvey and Joe studied the menu critically. The prices were phenomenally low. When they glanced up at Johnson in perplexity, he grinned, bowed and asked: "Everything satisfactory, gents?" "Quite," said Harvey. "We shall order." For an hour they were served amazing dishes, both fresh and canned, the culinary wealth of this planetoid and all the system. And the service was as extraordinary as the meal itself. With four hands, Genius played deftly upon a pair of mellow Venusian viotars , using his other two hands for waiting on the table. "We absolutely must purchase this incredible specimen," Harvey whispered excitedly when Johnson and the native were both in the kitchen, attending to the next course. "He would make any society hostess's season a riotous success, which should be worth a great sum to women like Mrs. van Schuyler-Morgan, merely for his hire." "Think of a fast one fast," Joe agreed. "You're right." "But I dislike having to revise my opinion of a man so often," complained Harvey. "I wish Johnson would stay either swindler or honest merchant. This dinner is worth as least twenty buckos, yet I estimate our check at a mere bucko twenty redsents." The mayor's appearance prevented them from continuing the discussion. "It's been a great honor, gents," he said. "Ain't often I have visitors, and I like the best, like you two gents." As if on cue, Genius came out and put the check down between Joe and Harvey. Harvey picked it up negligently, but his casual air vanished in a yelp of horror. "What the devil is this?" he shouted.—"How do you arrive at this fantastic, idiotic figure— three hundred and twenty-eight buckos !" Johnson didn't answer. Neither did Genius; he simply put on the table, not a fingerbowl, but a magnifying glass. With one of his thirty fingers he pointed politely to the bottom of the menu. Harvey focused on the microscopic print, and his face went pasty with rage. The minute note read: "Services and entertainment, 327 buckos 80 redsents." "You can go to hell!" Joe growled. "We won't pay it!" Johnson sighed ponderously. "I was afraid you'd act like that," he said with regret. He pulled a tin badge out of his rear pocket, pinned it on his vest, and twisted his holstered gun into view. "Afraid I'll have to ask the sheriff to take over." Johnson, the "sheriff," collected the money, and Johnson, the "restaurateur," pocketed it. Meanwhile, Harvey tipped Joe the sign to remain calm. "My friend," he said to the mayor, and his tones took on a schoolmasterish severity, "your long absence from Earth has perhaps made you forget those elements of human wisdom that have entered the folk-lore of your native planet. Such as, for example: 'It is folly to kill a goose that lays golden eggs,' and 'Penny wise is pound foolish.'" "I don't get the connection," objected Johnson. "Well, by obliging us to pay such a high price for your dinner, you put out of your reach the chance of profiting from a really substantial deal. My partner and I were prepared to make you a sizable offer for the peculiar creature you call Genius. But by reducing our funds the way you have—" "Who said I wanted to sell him?" the mayor interrupted. He rubbed his fingers together and asked disinterestedly: "What were you going to offer, anyhow?" "It doesn't matter any longer," Harvey said with elaborate carelessness. "Perhaps you wouldn't have accepted it, anyway." "That's right," Johnson came back emphatically. "But what would your offer have been which I would have turned down?" "Which one? The one we were going to make, or the one we can make now?" "Either one. It don't make no difference. Genius is too valuable to sell." "Oh, come now, Mr. Johnson. Don't tell me no amount of money would tempt you!" "Nope. But how much did you say?" "Ah, then you will consider releasing Genius!" "Well, I'll tell you something," said the mayor confidentially. "When you've got one thing, you've got one thing. But when you've got money, it's the same as having a lot of things. Because, if you've got money, you can buy this and that and this and that and—" "This and that," concluded Joe. "We'll give you five hundred buckos." "Now, gents!" Johnson remonstrated. "Why, six hundred would hardly—" "You haven't left us much money," Harvey put in. The mayor frowned. "All right, we'll split the difference. Make it five-fifty." Harvey was quick to pay out, for this was a genuine windfall. Then he stood up and admired the astonishing possession he had so inexpensively acquired. "I really hate to deprive you of this unique creature," he said to Johnson. "I should imagine you will be rather lonely, with only your filial mammoth to keep you company." "I sure will," Johnson confessed glumly. "I got pretty attached to Genius, and I'm going to miss him something awful." Harvey forcibly removed his eyes from the native, who was clearing off the table almost all at once. "My friend," he said, "we take your only solace, it is true, but in his place we can offer something no less amazing and instructive." The mayor's hand went protectively to his pocket. "What is it?" he asked with the suspicion of a man who has seen human nature at its worst and expects nothing better. "Joseph, get our most prized belonging from the communications room of the ship," Harvey instructed. To Johnson he explained: "You must see the wondrous instrument before its value can be appreciated. My partner will soon have it here for your astonishment." Joe's face grew as glum as Johnson's had been. "Aw, Harv," he protested, "do we have to sell it? And right when I thought we were getting the key!" "We must not be selfish, my boy," Harvey said nobly. "We have had our chance; now we must relinquish Fate to the hands of a man who might have more success than we. Go, Joseph. Bring it here." Unwillingly, Joe turned and shuffled out. On a larger and heavier world than Planetoid 42, Johnson's curiosity would probably have had weight and mass. He was bursting with questions, but he was obviously afraid they would cost him money. For his part, Harvey allowed that curiosity to grow like a Venusian amoeba until Joe came in, lugging a radio. "Is that what you were talking about?" the mayor snorted. "What makes you think I want a radio? I came here to get away from singers and political speech-makers." "Do not jump to hasty conclusions," Harvey cautioned. "Another word, and I shall refuse you the greatest opportunity any man has ever had, with the sole exceptions of Joseph, myself and the unfortunate inventor of this absolutely awe-inspiring device." "I ain't in the market for a radio," Johnson said stubbornly. Harvey nodded in relief. "We have attempted to repay our host, Joseph. He has spurned our generosity. We have now the chance to continue our study, which I am positive will soon reward us with the key to an enormous fortune." "Well, that's no plating off our bow," Joe grunted. "I'm glad he did turn it down. I hated to give it up after working on it for three whole years." He picked up the radio and began walking toward the door. "Now, hold on!" the mayor cried. "I ain't saying I'll buy, but what is it I'm turning down?" Joe returned and set the instrument down on the bar. His face sorrowful, Harvey fondly stroked the scarred plasticoid cabinet. "To make a long story, Mr. Johnson," he said, "Joseph and I were among the chosen few who knew the famous Doctor Dean intimately. Just before his tragic death, you will recall, Dean allegedly went insane." He banged his fist on the bar. "I have said it before, and I repeat again, that was a malicious lie, spread by the doctor's enemies to discredit his greatest invention—this fourth dimensional radio!" "This what?" Johnson blurted out. "In simple terms," clarified Harvey, "the ingenious doctor discovered that the yawning chasm between the dimensions could be bridged by energy of all quanta. There has never been any question that the inhabitants of the super-dimension would be far more civilized than ourselves. Consequently, the man who could tap their knowledge would find himself in possession of a powerful, undreamt-of science!" The mayor looked respectfully at the silent box on the bar. "And this thing gets broadcasts from the fourth dimension?" "It does, Mr. Johnson! Only charlatans like those who envied Doctor Dean's magnificent accomplishments could deny that fact." The mayor put his hands in his pockets, unswiveled one hip and stared thoughtfully at the battered cabinet. "Well, let's say it picks up fourth dimensional broadcasts," he conceded. "But how could you understand what they're saying? Folks up there wouldn't talk our language." Again Harvey smashed his fist down. "Do you dare to repeat the scurvy lie that broke Dean's spirit and drove him to suicide?" Johnson recoiled. "No—no, of course not . I mean, being up here, I naturally couldn't get all the details." "Naturally," Harvey agreed, mollified. "I'm sorry I lost my temper. But it is a matter of record that the doctor proved the broadcasts emanating from the super-dimension were in English! Why should that be so difficult to believe? Is it impossible that at one time there was communication between the dimensions, that the super-beings admired our language and adopted it in all its beauty, adding to it their own hyper-scientific trimmings?" "Why, I don't know," Johnson said in confusion. "For three years, Joseph and I lost sleep and hair, trying to detect the simple key that would translate the somewhat metamorphosed broadcasts into our primitive English. It eluded us. Even the doctor failed. But that was understandable; a sensitive soul like his could stand only so much. And the combination of ridicule and failure to solve the mystery caused him to take his own life." Johnson winced. "Is that what you want to unload on me?" "For a very good reason, sir. Patience is the virtue that will be rewarded with the key to these fourth dimensional broadcasts. A man who could devote his life to improving this lonely worldlet is obviously a person with unusual patience." "Yeah," the mayor said grudgingly, "I ain't exactly flighty." "Therefore, you are the man who could unravel the problem!" Johnson asked skeptically: "How about a sample first?" Harvey turned a knob on the face of the scarred radio. After several squeals of spatial figures, a smooth voice began: "There are omnious pleajes of moby-hailegs in sonmirand which, howgraismon, are notch to be donfured miss ellasellabell in either or both hagasanipaj, by all means. This does not refly, on the brother man, nat or mizzafil saces are denuded by this ossifaligo...." Harvey switched off the set determinedly. "Wait a minute!" Johnson begged. "I almost got it then!" "I dislike being commercial," said Harvey, "but this astounding device still belongs to us. Would we not be foolish to let you discover the clue before purchasing the right to do so?" The mayor nodded indecisively, looking at the radio with agonized longing. "How much do you want?" he asked unhappily. "One thousand buckos, and no haggling. I am not in the mood." Johnson opened his mouth to argue; then, seeing Harvey's set features, paid with the worst possible grace. "Don't you think we ought to tell him about the batteries, Harv?" Joe asked. "What about the batteries?" demanded Johnson with deadly calm. "A very small matter," Harvey said airily. "You see, we have been analyzing these broadcasts for three years. In that time, of course, the batteries are bound to weaken. I estimate these should last not less than one Terrestrial month, at the very least." "What do I do then?" Harvey shrugged. "Special batteries are required, which I see Joseph has by chance brought along. For the batteries, the only ones of their kind left in the system, I ask only what they cost—one hundred and ninety-nine buckos, no more and, on the other hand, no less." Johnson was breathing hard, and his hand hovered dangerously near his gun. But he paid the amount Harvey wanted. Moreover, he actually shook hands when the two panacea purveyors collected their six-armed prize and said goodbye. Before they were outside, however, he had turned on the radio and was listening tensely to a woman's highly cultured, though rather angry voice, saying: "Oh, you hannaforge are all beasa-taga-sanimort. If you rue amount it, how do you respench a pure woman to ansver go-samak—" "I'll get it!" they heard Johnson mutter. Then the sound of giant feet crossing the barroom floor reached their ears, and a shrill question: "What's that, Papa?" "A fortune, Jed! Those fakers are damned fools, selling us a thing like—" Joe gazed at Harvey admiringly. "Another one sold? Harv, that spiel pulls them in like an ether storm!" Together with the remarkable planetoid man, they reached the ship. Above them, dark, tumbling shapes blotted out the stars and silently moved on. Joe opened the gangway door. "Come on in, pal," he said to Genius. "We're shoving off." The planetoid man grinned foolishly. "Can't go arong with you," he said with an apologetic manner. "I rike to, but pressure fratten me out if I go." "What in solar blazes are you talking about?" Harvey asked. "I grow up on pranetoid," Genius explained. "On big pranet, too much pressure for me." The two salesmen looked narrowly at each other. "Did Johnson know that when he sold you?" Joe snarled. "Oh, sure." The silly grin became wider than ever. "Peopre from Earth buy me rots of times. I never reave pranetoid, though." "Joseph," Harvey said ominously, "that slick colonist has put one over upon us. What is our customary procedure in that event?" "We tear him apart," Joe replied between his teeth. "Not Mister Johnson," advised Genius. "Have gun and badge. He shoot you first and then rock you up in prison." Harvey paused, his ominous air vanishing. "True. There is also the fact, Joseph, that when he discovers the scrambled rectifier in the radio we sold him, he will have been paid back in full for his regrettable dishonesty." Unwillingly, Joe agreed. While Genius retreated to a safe distance, they entered the ship and blasted off. Within a few minutes the automatic steering pilot had maneuvered them above the plane of the asteroid belt. "I got kind of dizzy," Joe said, "there were so many deals back and forth. How much did we make on the sucker?" "A goodly amount, I wager," Harvey responded. He took out a pencil and paper. "Medicine, 469.50; radio, 1,000; batteries, 199. Total—let's see—1668 buckos and 50 redsents. A goodly sum, as I told you." He emptied his pockets of money, spread it out on the astrogation table and began counting. Finished, he looked up, troubled. "How much did we have when we landed, Joseph?" "Exactly 1668 buckos," Joe answered promptly. "I can't understand it," said Harvey. "Instead of double our capital, we now have only 1668 buckos and 50 redsents!" Feverishly, he returned to his pencil and paper. "Drinking water, 790; battery water, free; meal, 328; planetoid man, 550. Total: 1668 buckos!" He stared at the figures. "We paid out almost as much as we took in," he said bitterly. "Despite our intensive efforts, we made the absurd sum of fifty redsents." "Why, the dirty crook!" Joe growled. But after a few moments of sad reflection, Harvey became philosophical. "Perhaps, Joseph, we are more fortunate than we realize. We were, after all, completely in Johnson's power. The more I ponder, the more I believe we were lucky to escape. And, anyhow, we did make fifty redsents on the swindler. A moral victory, my boy." Joe, who had been sunk desparingly into a chair, now stood up slowly and asked: "Remember that bottle-opener we gave him?" "Certainly," Harvey explained. "What about it?" "How much did it cost us?" Harvey's eyebrows puckered. Suddenly he started laughing. "You're right, Joseph. We paid forty-six redsents for it on Venus. So, after all that transacting of business, we made four redsents!" "Four redsents, hell!" Joe snapped. "That was the sales tax!" He glared; then a smile lifted his mouth. "You remember those yokels on Mars' Flatlands, and the way they worshipped gold?" " Goldbricks! " Harvey said succinctly. Grinning, Joe set the robot-controls for Mars.

Describe the relationship between Harvey and Joe.

6

Harvey and Joe are colleagues and friends. They work together as solar salesmen, who con people by selling them their fake cure for all ailments. Their experience together makes them very effective conmen. It’s clear through their rapport and previously devised tricks that they have been working together for a long time. When Joe feigned being sick to sell the medicine, Harvey guided Johnson along with them and convinced him entirely of the medicine’s success.

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Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net GRIFTERS' ASTEROID By H. L. GOLD Harvey and Joe were the slickest con-men ever to gyp a space-lane sucker. Or so they thought! Angus Johnson knew differently. He charged them five buckos for a glass of water—and got it! [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories May 1943. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Characteristically, Harvey Ellsworth tried to maintain his dignity, though his parched tongue was almost hanging out. But Joe Mallon, with no dignity to maintain, lurched across the rubbish-strewn patch of land that had been termed a spaceport. When Harvey staggered pontifically into the battered metalloy saloon—the only one on Planetoid 42—his tall, gangling partner was already stumbling out, mouthing something incoherent. They met in the doorway, violently. "We're delirious!" Joe cried. "It's a mirage!" "What is?" asked Harvey through a mouthful of cotton. Joe reeled aside, and Harvey saw what had upset his partner. He stared, speechless for once. In their hectic voyages from planet to planet, the pair of panacea purveyors had encountered the usual strange life-forms. But never had they seen anything like the amazing creature in that colonial saloon. Paying no attention to them, it was carrying a case of liquor in two hands, six siphons in two others, and a broom and dustpan in the remaining pair. The bartender, a big man resembling the plumpish Harvey in build, was leaning negligently on the counter, ordering this impossible being to fill the partly-emptied bottles, squeeze fruit juice and sweep the floor, all of which the native did simultaneously. "Nonsense," Harvey croaked uncertainly. "We have seen enough queer things to know there are always more." He led the way inside. Through thirst-cracked lips he rasped: "Water—quick!" Without a word, the bartender reached under the counter, brought out two glasses of water. The interplanetary con-men drank noisily, asked for more, until they had drunk eight glasses. Meanwhile, the bartender had taken out eight jiggers and filled them with whiskey. Harvey and Joe were breathing hard from having gulped the water so fast, but they were beginning to revive. They noticed the bartender's impersonal eyes studying them shrewdly. "Strangers, eh?" he asked at last. "Solar salesmen, my colonial friend," Harvey answered in his usual lush manner. "We purvey that renowned Martian remedy, La-anago Yergis , the formula for which was recently discovered by ourselves in the ancient ruined city of La-anago. Medical science is unanimous in proclaiming this magic medicine the sole panacea in the entire history of therapeutics." "Yeah?" said the bartender disinterestedly, polishing the chaser glasses without washing them. "Where you heading?" "Out of Mars for Ganymede. Our condenser broke down, and we've gone without water for five ghastly days." "Got a mechanic around this dumping ground you call a port?" Joe asked. "We did. He came near starving and moved on to Titan. Ships don't land here unless they're in trouble." "Then where's the water lead-in? We'll fill up and push off." "Mayor takes care of that," replied the saloon owner. "If you gents're finished at the bar, your drinks'll be forty buckos." Harvey grinned puzzledly. "We didn't take any whiskey." "Might as well. Water's five buckos a glass. Liquor's free with every chaser." Harvey's eyes bulged. Joe gulped. "That—that's robbery!" the lanky man managed to get out in a thin quaver. The barkeeper shrugged. "When there ain't many customers, you gotta make more on each one. Besides—" "Besides nothing!" Joe roared, finding his voice again. "You dirty crook—robbing poor spacemen! You—" "You dirty crook!" Joe roared. "Robbing honest spacemen!" Harvey nudged him warningly. "Easy, my boy, easy." He turned to the bartender apologetically. "Don't mind my friend. His adrenal glands are sometimes overactive. You were going to say—?" The round face of the barkeeper had assumed an aggrieved expression. "Folks are always thinkin' the other feller's out to do 'em," he said, shaking his head. "Lemme explain about the water here. It's bitter as some kinds of sin before it's purified. Have to bring it in with buckets and make it sweet. That takes time and labor. Waddya think—I was chargin' feller critters for water just out of devilment? I charge because I gotta." "Friend," said Harvey, taking out a wallet and counting off eight five-bucko bills, "here is your money. What's fair is fair, and you have put a different complexion on what seemed at first to be an unconscionable interjection of a middleman between Nature and man's thirst." The saloon man removed his dirty apron and came around the bar. "If that's an apology, I accept it. Now the mayor'll discuss filling your tanks. That's me. I'm also justice of the peace, official recorder, fire chief...." "And chief of police, no doubt," said Harvey jocosely. "Nope. That's my son, Jed. Angus Johnson's my name. Folks here just call me Chief. I run this town, and run it right. How much water will you need?" Joe estimated quickly. "About seventy-five liters, if we go on half rations," he answered. He waited apprehensively. "Let's say ten buckos a liter," the mayor said. "On account of the quantity, I'm able to quote a bargain price. Shucks, boys, it hurts me more to charge for water than it does for you to pay. I just got to, that's all." The mayor gestured to the native, who shuffled out to the tanks with them. The planetoid man worked the pump while the mayor intently watched the crude level-gauge, crying "Stop!" when it registered the proper amount. Then Johnson rubbed his thumb on his index finger and wetted his lips expectantly. Harvey bravely counted off the bills. He asked: "But what are we to do about replenishing our battery fluid? Ten buckos a liter would be preposterous. We simply can't afford it." Johnson's response almost floored them. "Who said anything about charging you for battery water? You can have all you want for nothing. It's just the purified stuff that comes so high." After giving them directions that would take them to the free-water pool, the ponderous factotum of Planetoid 42 shook hands and headed back to the saloon. His six-armed assistant followed him inside. "Now do you see, my hot-tempered colleague?" said Harvey as he and Joe picked up buckets that hung on the tank. "Johnson, as I saw instantly, is the victim of a difficult environment, and must charge accordingly." "Just the same," Joe griped, "paying for water isn't something you can get used to in ten minutes." In the fragile forest, they soon came across a stream that sprang from the igneous soil and splashed into the small pond whose contents, according to the mayor, was theirs for the asking. They filled their buckets and hauled them to the ship, then returned for more. It was on the sixth trip that Joe caught a glimpse of Jupiter-shine on a bright surface off to the left. The figure, 750, with the bucko sign in front of it, was still doing acrobatics inside his skull and keeping a faint suspicion alive in him. So he called Harvey and they went to investigate. Among the skimpy ground-crawling vines, they saw a long slender mound that was unmistakably a buried pipe. "What's this doing here?" Harvey asked, puzzled. "I thought Johnson had to transport water in pails." "Wonder where it leads to," Joe said uneasily. "It leads to the saloon," said Harvey, his eyes rapidly tracing the pipe back toward the spaceport. "What I am concerned with is where it leads from ." Five minutes later, panting heavily from the unaccustomed exertion of scrambling through the tangle of planetorial undergrowth, they burst into the open—before a clear, sparkling pool. Mutely, Harvey pointed out a pipe-end jutting under the water. "I am growing suspicious," he said in a rigidly controlled voice. But Joe was already on his knees, scooping up a handful of water and tasting it. "Sweet!" he snarled. They rushed back to the first pool, where Joe again tasted a sample. His mouth went wry. "Bitter! He uses only one pool, the sweet one! The only thing that needs purifying around here is that blasted mayor's conscience." "The asteroidal Poobah has tricked us with a slick come-on," said Harvey slowly. His eyes grew cold. "Joseph, the good-natured artist in me has become a hard and merciless avenger. I shall not rest until we have had the best of this colonial con-man! Watch your cues from this point hence." Fists clenched, the two returned to the saloon. But at the door they stopped and their fists unclenched. "Thought you gents were leaving," the mayor called out, seeing them frozen in the doorway. "Glad you didn't. Now you can meet my son, Jed. Him and me are the whole Earthman population of Johnson City." "You don't need any more," said Harvey, dismayed. Johnson's eight-foot son, topped by a massive roof of sun-bleached hair and held up by a foundation that seemed immovable, had obviously been born and raised in low gravity. For any decent-sized world would have kept him down near the general dimensions of a man. He held out an acre of palm. Harvey studied it worriedly, put his own hand somewhere on it, swallowed as it closed, then breathed again when his fingers were released in five units instead of a single compressed one. "Pleased to meet you," piped a voice that had never known a dense atmosphere. The pursuit of vengeance, Harvey realized, had taken a quick and unpleasant turn. Something shrewd was called for.... "Joseph!" he exclaimed, looking at his partner in alarm. "Don't you feel well?" Even before the others could turn to him, Joe's practiced eyes were gently crossing. He sagged against the door frame, all his features drooping like a bloodhound's. "Bring him in here!" Johnson cried. "I mean, get him away! He's coming down with asteroid fever!" "Of course," replied Harvey calmly. "Any fool knows the first symptoms of the disease that once scourged the universe." "What do you mean, once ?" demanded Johnson. "I come down with it every year, and I ain't hankering to have it in an off-season. Get him out of here!" "In good time. He can't be moved immediately." "Then he'll be here for months!" Harvey helped Joe to the counter and lifted him up on it. The mayor and his gigantic offspring were cowering across the room, trying to breathe in tiny, uncontaminating gasps. "You'll find everything you want in the back room," Johnson said frantically, "sulfopyridine, mustard plasters, rubs, inhalers, suction cups—" "Relics of the past," Harvey stated. "One medication is all modern man requires to combat the dread menace, asteroid fever." "What's that?" asked the mayor without conviction. Instead of replying, Harvey hurried outside to the ungainly second-hand rocket ship in the center of the shabby spaceport. He returned within a few minutes, carrying a bottle. Joe was still stretched out on the bar, panting, his eyes slowly crossing and uncrossing. Harvey lifted the patient's head tenderly, put the bottle to his lips and tilted it until he was forced to drink. When Joe tried to pull away, Harvey was inexorable. He made his partner drink until most of the liquid was gone. Then he stepped back and waited for the inevitable result. Joe's performance was better than ever. He lay supine for several moments, his face twisted into an expression that seemed doomed to perpetual wryness. Slowly, however, he sat up and his features straightened out. "Are—are you all right?" asked the mayor anxiously. "Much better," said Joe in a weak voice. "Maybe you need another dose," Harvey suggested. Joe recoiled. "I'm fine now!" he cried, and sprang off the bar to prove it. Astonished, Johnson and his son drew closer. They searched Joe's face, and then the mayor timidly felt his pulse. "Well, I'll be hanged!" Johnson ejaculated. " La-anago Yergis never fails, my friend," Harvey explained. "By actual test, it conquers asteroid fever in from four to twenty-three minutes, depending on the severity of the attack. Luckily, we caught this one before it grew formidable." The mayor's eyes became clouded mirrors of an inward conflict. "If you don't charge too much," he said warily, "I might think of buying some." "We do not sell this unbelievable remedy," Harvey replied with dignity. "It sells itself." "'Course, I'd expect a considerable reduction if I bought a whole case," said Johnson. "That would be the smallest investment you could make, compared with the vast loss of time and strength the fever involves." "How much?" asked the mayor unhappily. "For you, since you have taken us in so hospitably, a mere five hundred buckos." Johnson did not actually stagger back, but he gave the impression of doing so. "F-four hundred," he offered. "Not a red cent less than four seventy-five," Harvey said flatly. "Make it four fifty," quavered Johnson. "I dislike haggling," said Harvey. The final price, however, was four hundred and sixty-nine buckos and fifty redsents. Magnanimously, Harvey added: "And we will include, gratis , an elegant bottle-opener, a superb product of Mercurian handicraftsmanship." Johnson stabbed out a warning finger. "No tricks now. I want a taste of that stuff. You're not switching some worthless junk on me." Harvey took a glass from the bar and poured him a generous sample. The mayor sniffed it, grimaced, then threw it down his gullet. The ensuing minute saw a grim battle between a man and his stomach, a battle which the man gradually won. "There ain't no words for that taste," he gulped when it was safe to talk again. "Medicine," Harvey propounded, "should taste like medicine." To Joe he said: "Come, my esteemed colleague. We must perform the sacred task to which we have dedicated ourselves." With Joe stumbling along behind, he left the saloon, crossed the clearing and entered the ship. As soon as they were inside, Joe dropped his murderous silence and cried: "What kind of a dirty trick was that, giving me poison instead of that snake oil?" "That was not poison," Harvey contradicted quietly. "It was La-anago Yergis extract, plus." "Plus what—arsenic?" "Now, Joseph! Consider my quandary when I came back here to manufacture our specific for all known ailments, with the intention of selling yonder asteroidal tin-horn a bill of medical goods—an entire case, mind you. Was I to mix the extract with the water for which we had been swindled to the tune of ten buckos a liter? Where would our profit have been, then? No; I had to use the bitter free water, of course." "But why use it on me?" Joe demanded furiously. Harvey looked reprovingly at his gangling partner. "Did Johnson ask to taste it, or did he not? One must look ahead, Joseph. I had to produce the same medicine that we will now manufacture. Thus, you were a guinea pig for a splendid cause." "Okay, okay," Joe said. "But you shoulda charged him more." "Joseph, I promise you that we shall get back every redsent of which that swindler cheated us, besides whatever other funds or valuables he possesses. We could not be content with less." "Well, we're starting all right," admitted Joe. "How about that thing with six arms? He looks like a valuable. Can't we grab him off?" Harvey stopped filling bottles and looked up pensively. "I have every hope of luring away the profitable monstrosity. Apparently you have also surmised the fortune we could make with him. At first I purpose to exhibit him on our interplanetary tours with our streamlined panacea; he would be a spectacular attraction for bucolic suckers. Later, a brief period of demonstrating his abilities on the audio-visiphone. Then our triumph—we shall sell him at a stupendous figure to the zoo!" Joe was still dazed by that monetary vista when he and Harvey carried the case of medicine to the saloon. The mayor had already cleared a place of honor in the cluttered back room, where he told them to put it down carefully. Then he took the elaborate bottle-opener Harvey gave him, reverently uncorked a bottle and sampled it. It must have been at least as good as the first; he gagged. "That's the stuff, all right," he said, swallowing hard. He counted out the money into Harvey's hand, at a moderate rate that precariously balanced between his pleasure at getting the fever remedy and his pain at paying for it. Then he glanced out to see the position of Jupiter, and asked: "You gents eaten yet? The restaurant's open now." Harvey and Joe looked at each other. They hadn't been thinking about food at all, but suddenly they realized that they were hungry. "It's only water we were short of," Harvey said apprehensively. "We've got rations back at the ship." " H-mph! " the mayor grunted. "Powdered concentrates. Compressed pap. Suit yourselves. We treat our stomachs better here. And you're welcome to our hospitality." "Your hospitality," said Harvey, "depends on the prices you charge." "Well, if that's what's worrying you, you can stop worrying," answered the mayor promptly. "What's more, the kind of dinner I serve here you can't get anywhere else for any price." Swiftly, Harvey conned the possibilities of being bilked again. He saw none. "Let's take a look at the menu, anyhow, Joe," he said guardedly. Johnson immediately fell into the role of "mine host." "Come right in, gents," he invited. "Right into the dining room." He seated them at a table, which a rope tied between posts made more or less private, though nobody else was in the saloon and there was little chance of company. Genius, the six-armed native, appeared from the dingy kitchen with two menus in one hand, two glasses of water in another, plus napkins, silverware, a pitcher, plates, saucers, cups, and their cocktails, which were on the house. Then he stood by for orders. Harvey and Joe studied the menu critically. The prices were phenomenally low. When they glanced up at Johnson in perplexity, he grinned, bowed and asked: "Everything satisfactory, gents?" "Quite," said Harvey. "We shall order." For an hour they were served amazing dishes, both fresh and canned, the culinary wealth of this planetoid and all the system. And the service was as extraordinary as the meal itself. With four hands, Genius played deftly upon a pair of mellow Venusian viotars , using his other two hands for waiting on the table. "We absolutely must purchase this incredible specimen," Harvey whispered excitedly when Johnson and the native were both in the kitchen, attending to the next course. "He would make any society hostess's season a riotous success, which should be worth a great sum to women like Mrs. van Schuyler-Morgan, merely for his hire." "Think of a fast one fast," Joe agreed. "You're right." "But I dislike having to revise my opinion of a man so often," complained Harvey. "I wish Johnson would stay either swindler or honest merchant. This dinner is worth as least twenty buckos, yet I estimate our check at a mere bucko twenty redsents." The mayor's appearance prevented them from continuing the discussion. "It's been a great honor, gents," he said. "Ain't often I have visitors, and I like the best, like you two gents." As if on cue, Genius came out and put the check down between Joe and Harvey. Harvey picked it up negligently, but his casual air vanished in a yelp of horror. "What the devil is this?" he shouted.—"How do you arrive at this fantastic, idiotic figure— three hundred and twenty-eight buckos !" Johnson didn't answer. Neither did Genius; he simply put on the table, not a fingerbowl, but a magnifying glass. With one of his thirty fingers he pointed politely to the bottom of the menu. Harvey focused on the microscopic print, and his face went pasty with rage. The minute note read: "Services and entertainment, 327 buckos 80 redsents." "You can go to hell!" Joe growled. "We won't pay it!" Johnson sighed ponderously. "I was afraid you'd act like that," he said with regret. He pulled a tin badge out of his rear pocket, pinned it on his vest, and twisted his holstered gun into view. "Afraid I'll have to ask the sheriff to take over." Johnson, the "sheriff," collected the money, and Johnson, the "restaurateur," pocketed it. Meanwhile, Harvey tipped Joe the sign to remain calm. "My friend," he said to the mayor, and his tones took on a schoolmasterish severity, "your long absence from Earth has perhaps made you forget those elements of human wisdom that have entered the folk-lore of your native planet. Such as, for example: 'It is folly to kill a goose that lays golden eggs,' and 'Penny wise is pound foolish.'" "I don't get the connection," objected Johnson. "Well, by obliging us to pay such a high price for your dinner, you put out of your reach the chance of profiting from a really substantial deal. My partner and I were prepared to make you a sizable offer for the peculiar creature you call Genius. But by reducing our funds the way you have—" "Who said I wanted to sell him?" the mayor interrupted. He rubbed his fingers together and asked disinterestedly: "What were you going to offer, anyhow?" "It doesn't matter any longer," Harvey said with elaborate carelessness. "Perhaps you wouldn't have accepted it, anyway." "That's right," Johnson came back emphatically. "But what would your offer have been which I would have turned down?" "Which one? The one we were going to make, or the one we can make now?" "Either one. It don't make no difference. Genius is too valuable to sell." "Oh, come now, Mr. Johnson. Don't tell me no amount of money would tempt you!" "Nope. But how much did you say?" "Ah, then you will consider releasing Genius!" "Well, I'll tell you something," said the mayor confidentially. "When you've got one thing, you've got one thing. But when you've got money, it's the same as having a lot of things. Because, if you've got money, you can buy this and that and this and that and—" "This and that," concluded Joe. "We'll give you five hundred buckos." "Now, gents!" Johnson remonstrated. "Why, six hundred would hardly—" "You haven't left us much money," Harvey put in. The mayor frowned. "All right, we'll split the difference. Make it five-fifty." Harvey was quick to pay out, for this was a genuine windfall. Then he stood up and admired the astonishing possession he had so inexpensively acquired. "I really hate to deprive you of this unique creature," he said to Johnson. "I should imagine you will be rather lonely, with only your filial mammoth to keep you company." "I sure will," Johnson confessed glumly. "I got pretty attached to Genius, and I'm going to miss him something awful." Harvey forcibly removed his eyes from the native, who was clearing off the table almost all at once. "My friend," he said, "we take your only solace, it is true, but in his place we can offer something no less amazing and instructive." The mayor's hand went protectively to his pocket. "What is it?" he asked with the suspicion of a man who has seen human nature at its worst and expects nothing better. "Joseph, get our most prized belonging from the communications room of the ship," Harvey instructed. To Johnson he explained: "You must see the wondrous instrument before its value can be appreciated. My partner will soon have it here for your astonishment." Joe's face grew as glum as Johnson's had been. "Aw, Harv," he protested, "do we have to sell it? And right when I thought we were getting the key!" "We must not be selfish, my boy," Harvey said nobly. "We have had our chance; now we must relinquish Fate to the hands of a man who might have more success than we. Go, Joseph. Bring it here." Unwillingly, Joe turned and shuffled out. On a larger and heavier world than Planetoid 42, Johnson's curiosity would probably have had weight and mass. He was bursting with questions, but he was obviously afraid they would cost him money. For his part, Harvey allowed that curiosity to grow like a Venusian amoeba until Joe came in, lugging a radio. "Is that what you were talking about?" the mayor snorted. "What makes you think I want a radio? I came here to get away from singers and political speech-makers." "Do not jump to hasty conclusions," Harvey cautioned. "Another word, and I shall refuse you the greatest opportunity any man has ever had, with the sole exceptions of Joseph, myself and the unfortunate inventor of this absolutely awe-inspiring device." "I ain't in the market for a radio," Johnson said stubbornly. Harvey nodded in relief. "We have attempted to repay our host, Joseph. He has spurned our generosity. We have now the chance to continue our study, which I am positive will soon reward us with the key to an enormous fortune." "Well, that's no plating off our bow," Joe grunted. "I'm glad he did turn it down. I hated to give it up after working on it for three whole years." He picked up the radio and began walking toward the door. "Now, hold on!" the mayor cried. "I ain't saying I'll buy, but what is it I'm turning down?" Joe returned and set the instrument down on the bar. His face sorrowful, Harvey fondly stroked the scarred plasticoid cabinet. "To make a long story, Mr. Johnson," he said, "Joseph and I were among the chosen few who knew the famous Doctor Dean intimately. Just before his tragic death, you will recall, Dean allegedly went insane." He banged his fist on the bar. "I have said it before, and I repeat again, that was a malicious lie, spread by the doctor's enemies to discredit his greatest invention—this fourth dimensional radio!" "This what?" Johnson blurted out. "In simple terms," clarified Harvey, "the ingenious doctor discovered that the yawning chasm between the dimensions could be bridged by energy of all quanta. There has never been any question that the inhabitants of the super-dimension would be far more civilized than ourselves. Consequently, the man who could tap their knowledge would find himself in possession of a powerful, undreamt-of science!" The mayor looked respectfully at the silent box on the bar. "And this thing gets broadcasts from the fourth dimension?" "It does, Mr. Johnson! Only charlatans like those who envied Doctor Dean's magnificent accomplishments could deny that fact." The mayor put his hands in his pockets, unswiveled one hip and stared thoughtfully at the battered cabinet. "Well, let's say it picks up fourth dimensional broadcasts," he conceded. "But how could you understand what they're saying? Folks up there wouldn't talk our language." Again Harvey smashed his fist down. "Do you dare to repeat the scurvy lie that broke Dean's spirit and drove him to suicide?" Johnson recoiled. "No—no, of course not . I mean, being up here, I naturally couldn't get all the details." "Naturally," Harvey agreed, mollified. "I'm sorry I lost my temper. But it is a matter of record that the doctor proved the broadcasts emanating from the super-dimension were in English! Why should that be so difficult to believe? Is it impossible that at one time there was communication between the dimensions, that the super-beings admired our language and adopted it in all its beauty, adding to it their own hyper-scientific trimmings?" "Why, I don't know," Johnson said in confusion. "For three years, Joseph and I lost sleep and hair, trying to detect the simple key that would translate the somewhat metamorphosed broadcasts into our primitive English. It eluded us. Even the doctor failed. But that was understandable; a sensitive soul like his could stand only so much. And the combination of ridicule and failure to solve the mystery caused him to take his own life." Johnson winced. "Is that what you want to unload on me?" "For a very good reason, sir. Patience is the virtue that will be rewarded with the key to these fourth dimensional broadcasts. A man who could devote his life to improving this lonely worldlet is obviously a person with unusual patience." "Yeah," the mayor said grudgingly, "I ain't exactly flighty." "Therefore, you are the man who could unravel the problem!" Johnson asked skeptically: "How about a sample first?" Harvey turned a knob on the face of the scarred radio. After several squeals of spatial figures, a smooth voice began: "There are omnious pleajes of moby-hailegs in sonmirand which, howgraismon, are notch to be donfured miss ellasellabell in either or both hagasanipaj, by all means. This does not refly, on the brother man, nat or mizzafil saces are denuded by this ossifaligo...." Harvey switched off the set determinedly. "Wait a minute!" Johnson begged. "I almost got it then!" "I dislike being commercial," said Harvey, "but this astounding device still belongs to us. Would we not be foolish to let you discover the clue before purchasing the right to do so?" The mayor nodded indecisively, looking at the radio with agonized longing. "How much do you want?" he asked unhappily. "One thousand buckos, and no haggling. I am not in the mood." Johnson opened his mouth to argue; then, seeing Harvey's set features, paid with the worst possible grace. "Don't you think we ought to tell him about the batteries, Harv?" Joe asked. "What about the batteries?" demanded Johnson with deadly calm. "A very small matter," Harvey said airily. "You see, we have been analyzing these broadcasts for three years. In that time, of course, the batteries are bound to weaken. I estimate these should last not less than one Terrestrial month, at the very least." "What do I do then?" Harvey shrugged. "Special batteries are required, which I see Joseph has by chance brought along. For the batteries, the only ones of their kind left in the system, I ask only what they cost—one hundred and ninety-nine buckos, no more and, on the other hand, no less." Johnson was breathing hard, and his hand hovered dangerously near his gun. But he paid the amount Harvey wanted. Moreover, he actually shook hands when the two panacea purveyors collected their six-armed prize and said goodbye. Before they were outside, however, he had turned on the radio and was listening tensely to a woman's highly cultured, though rather angry voice, saying: "Oh, you hannaforge are all beasa-taga-sanimort. If you rue amount it, how do you respench a pure woman to ansver go-samak—" "I'll get it!" they heard Johnson mutter. Then the sound of giant feet crossing the barroom floor reached their ears, and a shrill question: "What's that, Papa?" "A fortune, Jed! Those fakers are damned fools, selling us a thing like—" Joe gazed at Harvey admiringly. "Another one sold? Harv, that spiel pulls them in like an ether storm!" Together with the remarkable planetoid man, they reached the ship. Above them, dark, tumbling shapes blotted out the stars and silently moved on. Joe opened the gangway door. "Come on in, pal," he said to Genius. "We're shoving off." The planetoid man grinned foolishly. "Can't go arong with you," he said with an apologetic manner. "I rike to, but pressure fratten me out if I go." "What in solar blazes are you talking about?" Harvey asked. "I grow up on pranetoid," Genius explained. "On big pranet, too much pressure for me." The two salesmen looked narrowly at each other. "Did Johnson know that when he sold you?" Joe snarled. "Oh, sure." The silly grin became wider than ever. "Peopre from Earth buy me rots of times. I never reave pranetoid, though." "Joseph," Harvey said ominously, "that slick colonist has put one over upon us. What is our customary procedure in that event?" "We tear him apart," Joe replied between his teeth. "Not Mister Johnson," advised Genius. "Have gun and badge. He shoot you first and then rock you up in prison." Harvey paused, his ominous air vanishing. "True. There is also the fact, Joseph, that when he discovers the scrambled rectifier in the radio we sold him, he will have been paid back in full for his regrettable dishonesty." Unwillingly, Joe agreed. While Genius retreated to a safe distance, they entered the ship and blasted off. Within a few minutes the automatic steering pilot had maneuvered them above the plane of the asteroid belt. "I got kind of dizzy," Joe said, "there were so many deals back and forth. How much did we make on the sucker?" "A goodly amount, I wager," Harvey responded. He took out a pencil and paper. "Medicine, 469.50; radio, 1,000; batteries, 199. Total—let's see—1668 buckos and 50 redsents. A goodly sum, as I told you." He emptied his pockets of money, spread it out on the astrogation table and began counting. Finished, he looked up, troubled. "How much did we have when we landed, Joseph?" "Exactly 1668 buckos," Joe answered promptly. "I can't understand it," said Harvey. "Instead of double our capital, we now have only 1668 buckos and 50 redsents!" Feverishly, he returned to his pencil and paper. "Drinking water, 790; battery water, free; meal, 328; planetoid man, 550. Total: 1668 buckos!" He stared at the figures. "We paid out almost as much as we took in," he said bitterly. "Despite our intensive efforts, we made the absurd sum of fifty redsents." "Why, the dirty crook!" Joe growled. But after a few moments of sad reflection, Harvey became philosophical. "Perhaps, Joseph, we are more fortunate than we realize. We were, after all, completely in Johnson's power. The more I ponder, the more I believe we were lucky to escape. And, anyhow, we did make fifty redsents on the swindler. A moral victory, my boy." Joe, who had been sunk desparingly into a chair, now stood up slowly and asked: "Remember that bottle-opener we gave him?" "Certainly," Harvey explained. "What about it?" "How much did it cost us?" Harvey's eyebrows puckered. Suddenly he started laughing. "You're right, Joseph. We paid forty-six redsents for it on Venus. So, after all that transacting of business, we made four redsents!" "Four redsents, hell!" Joe snapped. "That was the sales tax!" He glared; then a smile lifted his mouth. "You remember those yokels on Mars' Flatlands, and the way they worshipped gold?" " Goldbricks! " Harvey said succinctly. Grinning, Joe set the robot-controls for Mars.

Describe the relationship between Harvey and Joe.

3

Harvey Ellsworth and Joe Mallon have very complementary personalities: when we meet them, they show us that Harvey is the levelheaded one who tries to see the best in people, but Joe is much more reactive and has less of a performative air to his demeanor. They know each other quite well, enough that they are able to communicate with each other discreetly to give each other direction while trying to run a con. Harvey is the one who holds on to hope in an interesting sense: he is able to take previous experiences to formulate plans for current predicaments, in a way that means he is not easily rattled. This presents itself in Harvey acting as sort of a leader of the duo, and Harvey comes up with plans and directs Joe as needed. Harvey steers a lot of the conversations they have with others, and when it’s just the two of them, Harry spends a lot of time scolding Joe for his attitude. Even though Harvey tries to see the best in Johnson at the beginning of the story, he eventually agrees with Joe’s anger once they realize that Johnson did not need to purify the water that he had sold them. However, whereas Joe was angry at the treatment they were receiving, Harvey more directly wanted revenge. In the end, when they leave Planetoid 42, we see them connect about their history again, excited to run another con together.

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Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net GRIFTERS' ASTEROID By H. L. GOLD Harvey and Joe were the slickest con-men ever to gyp a space-lane sucker. Or so they thought! Angus Johnson knew differently. He charged them five buckos for a glass of water—and got it! [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories May 1943. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Characteristically, Harvey Ellsworth tried to maintain his dignity, though his parched tongue was almost hanging out. But Joe Mallon, with no dignity to maintain, lurched across the rubbish-strewn patch of land that had been termed a spaceport. When Harvey staggered pontifically into the battered metalloy saloon—the only one on Planetoid 42—his tall, gangling partner was already stumbling out, mouthing something incoherent. They met in the doorway, violently. "We're delirious!" Joe cried. "It's a mirage!" "What is?" asked Harvey through a mouthful of cotton. Joe reeled aside, and Harvey saw what had upset his partner. He stared, speechless for once. In their hectic voyages from planet to planet, the pair of panacea purveyors had encountered the usual strange life-forms. But never had they seen anything like the amazing creature in that colonial saloon. Paying no attention to them, it was carrying a case of liquor in two hands, six siphons in two others, and a broom and dustpan in the remaining pair. The bartender, a big man resembling the plumpish Harvey in build, was leaning negligently on the counter, ordering this impossible being to fill the partly-emptied bottles, squeeze fruit juice and sweep the floor, all of which the native did simultaneously. "Nonsense," Harvey croaked uncertainly. "We have seen enough queer things to know there are always more." He led the way inside. Through thirst-cracked lips he rasped: "Water—quick!" Without a word, the bartender reached under the counter, brought out two glasses of water. The interplanetary con-men drank noisily, asked for more, until they had drunk eight glasses. Meanwhile, the bartender had taken out eight jiggers and filled them with whiskey. Harvey and Joe were breathing hard from having gulped the water so fast, but they were beginning to revive. They noticed the bartender's impersonal eyes studying them shrewdly. "Strangers, eh?" he asked at last. "Solar salesmen, my colonial friend," Harvey answered in his usual lush manner. "We purvey that renowned Martian remedy, La-anago Yergis , the formula for which was recently discovered by ourselves in the ancient ruined city of La-anago. Medical science is unanimous in proclaiming this magic medicine the sole panacea in the entire history of therapeutics." "Yeah?" said the bartender disinterestedly, polishing the chaser glasses without washing them. "Where you heading?" "Out of Mars for Ganymede. Our condenser broke down, and we've gone without water for five ghastly days." "Got a mechanic around this dumping ground you call a port?" Joe asked. "We did. He came near starving and moved on to Titan. Ships don't land here unless they're in trouble." "Then where's the water lead-in? We'll fill up and push off." "Mayor takes care of that," replied the saloon owner. "If you gents're finished at the bar, your drinks'll be forty buckos." Harvey grinned puzzledly. "We didn't take any whiskey." "Might as well. Water's five buckos a glass. Liquor's free with every chaser." Harvey's eyes bulged. Joe gulped. "That—that's robbery!" the lanky man managed to get out in a thin quaver. The barkeeper shrugged. "When there ain't many customers, you gotta make more on each one. Besides—" "Besides nothing!" Joe roared, finding his voice again. "You dirty crook—robbing poor spacemen! You—" "You dirty crook!" Joe roared. "Robbing honest spacemen!" Harvey nudged him warningly. "Easy, my boy, easy." He turned to the bartender apologetically. "Don't mind my friend. His adrenal glands are sometimes overactive. You were going to say—?" The round face of the barkeeper had assumed an aggrieved expression. "Folks are always thinkin' the other feller's out to do 'em," he said, shaking his head. "Lemme explain about the water here. It's bitter as some kinds of sin before it's purified. Have to bring it in with buckets and make it sweet. That takes time and labor. Waddya think—I was chargin' feller critters for water just out of devilment? I charge because I gotta." "Friend," said Harvey, taking out a wallet and counting off eight five-bucko bills, "here is your money. What's fair is fair, and you have put a different complexion on what seemed at first to be an unconscionable interjection of a middleman between Nature and man's thirst." The saloon man removed his dirty apron and came around the bar. "If that's an apology, I accept it. Now the mayor'll discuss filling your tanks. That's me. I'm also justice of the peace, official recorder, fire chief...." "And chief of police, no doubt," said Harvey jocosely. "Nope. That's my son, Jed. Angus Johnson's my name. Folks here just call me Chief. I run this town, and run it right. How much water will you need?" Joe estimated quickly. "About seventy-five liters, if we go on half rations," he answered. He waited apprehensively. "Let's say ten buckos a liter," the mayor said. "On account of the quantity, I'm able to quote a bargain price. Shucks, boys, it hurts me more to charge for water than it does for you to pay. I just got to, that's all." The mayor gestured to the native, who shuffled out to the tanks with them. The planetoid man worked the pump while the mayor intently watched the crude level-gauge, crying "Stop!" when it registered the proper amount. Then Johnson rubbed his thumb on his index finger and wetted his lips expectantly. Harvey bravely counted off the bills. He asked: "But what are we to do about replenishing our battery fluid? Ten buckos a liter would be preposterous. We simply can't afford it." Johnson's response almost floored them. "Who said anything about charging you for battery water? You can have all you want for nothing. It's just the purified stuff that comes so high." After giving them directions that would take them to the free-water pool, the ponderous factotum of Planetoid 42 shook hands and headed back to the saloon. His six-armed assistant followed him inside. "Now do you see, my hot-tempered colleague?" said Harvey as he and Joe picked up buckets that hung on the tank. "Johnson, as I saw instantly, is the victim of a difficult environment, and must charge accordingly." "Just the same," Joe griped, "paying for water isn't something you can get used to in ten minutes." In the fragile forest, they soon came across a stream that sprang from the igneous soil and splashed into the small pond whose contents, according to the mayor, was theirs for the asking. They filled their buckets and hauled them to the ship, then returned for more. It was on the sixth trip that Joe caught a glimpse of Jupiter-shine on a bright surface off to the left. The figure, 750, with the bucko sign in front of it, was still doing acrobatics inside his skull and keeping a faint suspicion alive in him. So he called Harvey and they went to investigate. Among the skimpy ground-crawling vines, they saw a long slender mound that was unmistakably a buried pipe. "What's this doing here?" Harvey asked, puzzled. "I thought Johnson had to transport water in pails." "Wonder where it leads to," Joe said uneasily. "It leads to the saloon," said Harvey, his eyes rapidly tracing the pipe back toward the spaceport. "What I am concerned with is where it leads from ." Five minutes later, panting heavily from the unaccustomed exertion of scrambling through the tangle of planetorial undergrowth, they burst into the open—before a clear, sparkling pool. Mutely, Harvey pointed out a pipe-end jutting under the water. "I am growing suspicious," he said in a rigidly controlled voice. But Joe was already on his knees, scooping up a handful of water and tasting it. "Sweet!" he snarled. They rushed back to the first pool, where Joe again tasted a sample. His mouth went wry. "Bitter! He uses only one pool, the sweet one! The only thing that needs purifying around here is that blasted mayor's conscience." "The asteroidal Poobah has tricked us with a slick come-on," said Harvey slowly. His eyes grew cold. "Joseph, the good-natured artist in me has become a hard and merciless avenger. I shall not rest until we have had the best of this colonial con-man! Watch your cues from this point hence." Fists clenched, the two returned to the saloon. But at the door they stopped and their fists unclenched. "Thought you gents were leaving," the mayor called out, seeing them frozen in the doorway. "Glad you didn't. Now you can meet my son, Jed. Him and me are the whole Earthman population of Johnson City." "You don't need any more," said Harvey, dismayed. Johnson's eight-foot son, topped by a massive roof of sun-bleached hair and held up by a foundation that seemed immovable, had obviously been born and raised in low gravity. For any decent-sized world would have kept him down near the general dimensions of a man. He held out an acre of palm. Harvey studied it worriedly, put his own hand somewhere on it, swallowed as it closed, then breathed again when his fingers were released in five units instead of a single compressed one. "Pleased to meet you," piped a voice that had never known a dense atmosphere. The pursuit of vengeance, Harvey realized, had taken a quick and unpleasant turn. Something shrewd was called for.... "Joseph!" he exclaimed, looking at his partner in alarm. "Don't you feel well?" Even before the others could turn to him, Joe's practiced eyes were gently crossing. He sagged against the door frame, all his features drooping like a bloodhound's. "Bring him in here!" Johnson cried. "I mean, get him away! He's coming down with asteroid fever!" "Of course," replied Harvey calmly. "Any fool knows the first symptoms of the disease that once scourged the universe." "What do you mean, once ?" demanded Johnson. "I come down with it every year, and I ain't hankering to have it in an off-season. Get him out of here!" "In good time. He can't be moved immediately." "Then he'll be here for months!" Harvey helped Joe to the counter and lifted him up on it. The mayor and his gigantic offspring were cowering across the room, trying to breathe in tiny, uncontaminating gasps. "You'll find everything you want in the back room," Johnson said frantically, "sulfopyridine, mustard plasters, rubs, inhalers, suction cups—" "Relics of the past," Harvey stated. "One medication is all modern man requires to combat the dread menace, asteroid fever." "What's that?" asked the mayor without conviction. Instead of replying, Harvey hurried outside to the ungainly second-hand rocket ship in the center of the shabby spaceport. He returned within a few minutes, carrying a bottle. Joe was still stretched out on the bar, panting, his eyes slowly crossing and uncrossing. Harvey lifted the patient's head tenderly, put the bottle to his lips and tilted it until he was forced to drink. When Joe tried to pull away, Harvey was inexorable. He made his partner drink until most of the liquid was gone. Then he stepped back and waited for the inevitable result. Joe's performance was better than ever. He lay supine for several moments, his face twisted into an expression that seemed doomed to perpetual wryness. Slowly, however, he sat up and his features straightened out. "Are—are you all right?" asked the mayor anxiously. "Much better," said Joe in a weak voice. "Maybe you need another dose," Harvey suggested. Joe recoiled. "I'm fine now!" he cried, and sprang off the bar to prove it. Astonished, Johnson and his son drew closer. They searched Joe's face, and then the mayor timidly felt his pulse. "Well, I'll be hanged!" Johnson ejaculated. " La-anago Yergis never fails, my friend," Harvey explained. "By actual test, it conquers asteroid fever in from four to twenty-three minutes, depending on the severity of the attack. Luckily, we caught this one before it grew formidable." The mayor's eyes became clouded mirrors of an inward conflict. "If you don't charge too much," he said warily, "I might think of buying some." "We do not sell this unbelievable remedy," Harvey replied with dignity. "It sells itself." "'Course, I'd expect a considerable reduction if I bought a whole case," said Johnson. "That would be the smallest investment you could make, compared with the vast loss of time and strength the fever involves." "How much?" asked the mayor unhappily. "For you, since you have taken us in so hospitably, a mere five hundred buckos." Johnson did not actually stagger back, but he gave the impression of doing so. "F-four hundred," he offered. "Not a red cent less than four seventy-five," Harvey said flatly. "Make it four fifty," quavered Johnson. "I dislike haggling," said Harvey. The final price, however, was four hundred and sixty-nine buckos and fifty redsents. Magnanimously, Harvey added: "And we will include, gratis , an elegant bottle-opener, a superb product of Mercurian handicraftsmanship." Johnson stabbed out a warning finger. "No tricks now. I want a taste of that stuff. You're not switching some worthless junk on me." Harvey took a glass from the bar and poured him a generous sample. The mayor sniffed it, grimaced, then threw it down his gullet. The ensuing minute saw a grim battle between a man and his stomach, a battle which the man gradually won. "There ain't no words for that taste," he gulped when it was safe to talk again. "Medicine," Harvey propounded, "should taste like medicine." To Joe he said: "Come, my esteemed colleague. We must perform the sacred task to which we have dedicated ourselves." With Joe stumbling along behind, he left the saloon, crossed the clearing and entered the ship. As soon as they were inside, Joe dropped his murderous silence and cried: "What kind of a dirty trick was that, giving me poison instead of that snake oil?" "That was not poison," Harvey contradicted quietly. "It was La-anago Yergis extract, plus." "Plus what—arsenic?" "Now, Joseph! Consider my quandary when I came back here to manufacture our specific for all known ailments, with the intention of selling yonder asteroidal tin-horn a bill of medical goods—an entire case, mind you. Was I to mix the extract with the water for which we had been swindled to the tune of ten buckos a liter? Where would our profit have been, then? No; I had to use the bitter free water, of course." "But why use it on me?" Joe demanded furiously. Harvey looked reprovingly at his gangling partner. "Did Johnson ask to taste it, or did he not? One must look ahead, Joseph. I had to produce the same medicine that we will now manufacture. Thus, you were a guinea pig for a splendid cause." "Okay, okay," Joe said. "But you shoulda charged him more." "Joseph, I promise you that we shall get back every redsent of which that swindler cheated us, besides whatever other funds or valuables he possesses. We could not be content with less." "Well, we're starting all right," admitted Joe. "How about that thing with six arms? He looks like a valuable. Can't we grab him off?" Harvey stopped filling bottles and looked up pensively. "I have every hope of luring away the profitable monstrosity. Apparently you have also surmised the fortune we could make with him. At first I purpose to exhibit him on our interplanetary tours with our streamlined panacea; he would be a spectacular attraction for bucolic suckers. Later, a brief period of demonstrating his abilities on the audio-visiphone. Then our triumph—we shall sell him at a stupendous figure to the zoo!" Joe was still dazed by that monetary vista when he and Harvey carried the case of medicine to the saloon. The mayor had already cleared a place of honor in the cluttered back room, where he told them to put it down carefully. Then he took the elaborate bottle-opener Harvey gave him, reverently uncorked a bottle and sampled it. It must have been at least as good as the first; he gagged. "That's the stuff, all right," he said, swallowing hard. He counted out the money into Harvey's hand, at a moderate rate that precariously balanced between his pleasure at getting the fever remedy and his pain at paying for it. Then he glanced out to see the position of Jupiter, and asked: "You gents eaten yet? The restaurant's open now." Harvey and Joe looked at each other. They hadn't been thinking about food at all, but suddenly they realized that they were hungry. "It's only water we were short of," Harvey said apprehensively. "We've got rations back at the ship." " H-mph! " the mayor grunted. "Powdered concentrates. Compressed pap. Suit yourselves. We treat our stomachs better here. And you're welcome to our hospitality." "Your hospitality," said Harvey, "depends on the prices you charge." "Well, if that's what's worrying you, you can stop worrying," answered the mayor promptly. "What's more, the kind of dinner I serve here you can't get anywhere else for any price." Swiftly, Harvey conned the possibilities of being bilked again. He saw none. "Let's take a look at the menu, anyhow, Joe," he said guardedly. Johnson immediately fell into the role of "mine host." "Come right in, gents," he invited. "Right into the dining room." He seated them at a table, which a rope tied between posts made more or less private, though nobody else was in the saloon and there was little chance of company. Genius, the six-armed native, appeared from the dingy kitchen with two menus in one hand, two glasses of water in another, plus napkins, silverware, a pitcher, plates, saucers, cups, and their cocktails, which were on the house. Then he stood by for orders. Harvey and Joe studied the menu critically. The prices were phenomenally low. When they glanced up at Johnson in perplexity, he grinned, bowed and asked: "Everything satisfactory, gents?" "Quite," said Harvey. "We shall order." For an hour they were served amazing dishes, both fresh and canned, the culinary wealth of this planetoid and all the system. And the service was as extraordinary as the meal itself. With four hands, Genius played deftly upon a pair of mellow Venusian viotars , using his other two hands for waiting on the table. "We absolutely must purchase this incredible specimen," Harvey whispered excitedly when Johnson and the native were both in the kitchen, attending to the next course. "He would make any society hostess's season a riotous success, which should be worth a great sum to women like Mrs. van Schuyler-Morgan, merely for his hire." "Think of a fast one fast," Joe agreed. "You're right." "But I dislike having to revise my opinion of a man so often," complained Harvey. "I wish Johnson would stay either swindler or honest merchant. This dinner is worth as least twenty buckos, yet I estimate our check at a mere bucko twenty redsents." The mayor's appearance prevented them from continuing the discussion. "It's been a great honor, gents," he said. "Ain't often I have visitors, and I like the best, like you two gents." As if on cue, Genius came out and put the check down between Joe and Harvey. Harvey picked it up negligently, but his casual air vanished in a yelp of horror. "What the devil is this?" he shouted.—"How do you arrive at this fantastic, idiotic figure— three hundred and twenty-eight buckos !" Johnson didn't answer. Neither did Genius; he simply put on the table, not a fingerbowl, but a magnifying glass. With one of his thirty fingers he pointed politely to the bottom of the menu. Harvey focused on the microscopic print, and his face went pasty with rage. The minute note read: "Services and entertainment, 327 buckos 80 redsents." "You can go to hell!" Joe growled. "We won't pay it!" Johnson sighed ponderously. "I was afraid you'd act like that," he said with regret. He pulled a tin badge out of his rear pocket, pinned it on his vest, and twisted his holstered gun into view. "Afraid I'll have to ask the sheriff to take over." Johnson, the "sheriff," collected the money, and Johnson, the "restaurateur," pocketed it. Meanwhile, Harvey tipped Joe the sign to remain calm. "My friend," he said to the mayor, and his tones took on a schoolmasterish severity, "your long absence from Earth has perhaps made you forget those elements of human wisdom that have entered the folk-lore of your native planet. Such as, for example: 'It is folly to kill a goose that lays golden eggs,' and 'Penny wise is pound foolish.'" "I don't get the connection," objected Johnson. "Well, by obliging us to pay such a high price for your dinner, you put out of your reach the chance of profiting from a really substantial deal. My partner and I were prepared to make you a sizable offer for the peculiar creature you call Genius. But by reducing our funds the way you have—" "Who said I wanted to sell him?" the mayor interrupted. He rubbed his fingers together and asked disinterestedly: "What were you going to offer, anyhow?" "It doesn't matter any longer," Harvey said with elaborate carelessness. "Perhaps you wouldn't have accepted it, anyway." "That's right," Johnson came back emphatically. "But what would your offer have been which I would have turned down?" "Which one? The one we were going to make, or the one we can make now?" "Either one. It don't make no difference. Genius is too valuable to sell." "Oh, come now, Mr. Johnson. Don't tell me no amount of money would tempt you!" "Nope. But how much did you say?" "Ah, then you will consider releasing Genius!" "Well, I'll tell you something," said the mayor confidentially. "When you've got one thing, you've got one thing. But when you've got money, it's the same as having a lot of things. Because, if you've got money, you can buy this and that and this and that and—" "This and that," concluded Joe. "We'll give you five hundred buckos." "Now, gents!" Johnson remonstrated. "Why, six hundred would hardly—" "You haven't left us much money," Harvey put in. The mayor frowned. "All right, we'll split the difference. Make it five-fifty." Harvey was quick to pay out, for this was a genuine windfall. Then he stood up and admired the astonishing possession he had so inexpensively acquired. "I really hate to deprive you of this unique creature," he said to Johnson. "I should imagine you will be rather lonely, with only your filial mammoth to keep you company." "I sure will," Johnson confessed glumly. "I got pretty attached to Genius, and I'm going to miss him something awful." Harvey forcibly removed his eyes from the native, who was clearing off the table almost all at once. "My friend," he said, "we take your only solace, it is true, but in his place we can offer something no less amazing and instructive." The mayor's hand went protectively to his pocket. "What is it?" he asked with the suspicion of a man who has seen human nature at its worst and expects nothing better. "Joseph, get our most prized belonging from the communications room of the ship," Harvey instructed. To Johnson he explained: "You must see the wondrous instrument before its value can be appreciated. My partner will soon have it here for your astonishment." Joe's face grew as glum as Johnson's had been. "Aw, Harv," he protested, "do we have to sell it? And right when I thought we were getting the key!" "We must not be selfish, my boy," Harvey said nobly. "We have had our chance; now we must relinquish Fate to the hands of a man who might have more success than we. Go, Joseph. Bring it here." Unwillingly, Joe turned and shuffled out. On a larger and heavier world than Planetoid 42, Johnson's curiosity would probably have had weight and mass. He was bursting with questions, but he was obviously afraid they would cost him money. For his part, Harvey allowed that curiosity to grow like a Venusian amoeba until Joe came in, lugging a radio. "Is that what you were talking about?" the mayor snorted. "What makes you think I want a radio? I came here to get away from singers and political speech-makers." "Do not jump to hasty conclusions," Harvey cautioned. "Another word, and I shall refuse you the greatest opportunity any man has ever had, with the sole exceptions of Joseph, myself and the unfortunate inventor of this absolutely awe-inspiring device." "I ain't in the market for a radio," Johnson said stubbornly. Harvey nodded in relief. "We have attempted to repay our host, Joseph. He has spurned our generosity. We have now the chance to continue our study, which I am positive will soon reward us with the key to an enormous fortune." "Well, that's no plating off our bow," Joe grunted. "I'm glad he did turn it down. I hated to give it up after working on it for three whole years." He picked up the radio and began walking toward the door. "Now, hold on!" the mayor cried. "I ain't saying I'll buy, but what is it I'm turning down?" Joe returned and set the instrument down on the bar. His face sorrowful, Harvey fondly stroked the scarred plasticoid cabinet. "To make a long story, Mr. Johnson," he said, "Joseph and I were among the chosen few who knew the famous Doctor Dean intimately. Just before his tragic death, you will recall, Dean allegedly went insane." He banged his fist on the bar. "I have said it before, and I repeat again, that was a malicious lie, spread by the doctor's enemies to discredit his greatest invention—this fourth dimensional radio!" "This what?" Johnson blurted out. "In simple terms," clarified Harvey, "the ingenious doctor discovered that the yawning chasm between the dimensions could be bridged by energy of all quanta. There has never been any question that the inhabitants of the super-dimension would be far more civilized than ourselves. Consequently, the man who could tap their knowledge would find himself in possession of a powerful, undreamt-of science!" The mayor looked respectfully at the silent box on the bar. "And this thing gets broadcasts from the fourth dimension?" "It does, Mr. Johnson! Only charlatans like those who envied Doctor Dean's magnificent accomplishments could deny that fact." The mayor put his hands in his pockets, unswiveled one hip and stared thoughtfully at the battered cabinet. "Well, let's say it picks up fourth dimensional broadcasts," he conceded. "But how could you understand what they're saying? Folks up there wouldn't talk our language." Again Harvey smashed his fist down. "Do you dare to repeat the scurvy lie that broke Dean's spirit and drove him to suicide?" Johnson recoiled. "No—no, of course not . I mean, being up here, I naturally couldn't get all the details." "Naturally," Harvey agreed, mollified. "I'm sorry I lost my temper. But it is a matter of record that the doctor proved the broadcasts emanating from the super-dimension were in English! Why should that be so difficult to believe? Is it impossible that at one time there was communication between the dimensions, that the super-beings admired our language and adopted it in all its beauty, adding to it their own hyper-scientific trimmings?" "Why, I don't know," Johnson said in confusion. "For three years, Joseph and I lost sleep and hair, trying to detect the simple key that would translate the somewhat metamorphosed broadcasts into our primitive English. It eluded us. Even the doctor failed. But that was understandable; a sensitive soul like his could stand only so much. And the combination of ridicule and failure to solve the mystery caused him to take his own life." Johnson winced. "Is that what you want to unload on me?" "For a very good reason, sir. Patience is the virtue that will be rewarded with the key to these fourth dimensional broadcasts. A man who could devote his life to improving this lonely worldlet is obviously a person with unusual patience." "Yeah," the mayor said grudgingly, "I ain't exactly flighty." "Therefore, you are the man who could unravel the problem!" Johnson asked skeptically: "How about a sample first?" Harvey turned a knob on the face of the scarred radio. After several squeals of spatial figures, a smooth voice began: "There are omnious pleajes of moby-hailegs in sonmirand which, howgraismon, are notch to be donfured miss ellasellabell in either or both hagasanipaj, by all means. This does not refly, on the brother man, nat or mizzafil saces are denuded by this ossifaligo...." Harvey switched off the set determinedly. "Wait a minute!" Johnson begged. "I almost got it then!" "I dislike being commercial," said Harvey, "but this astounding device still belongs to us. Would we not be foolish to let you discover the clue before purchasing the right to do so?" The mayor nodded indecisively, looking at the radio with agonized longing. "How much do you want?" he asked unhappily. "One thousand buckos, and no haggling. I am not in the mood." Johnson opened his mouth to argue; then, seeing Harvey's set features, paid with the worst possible grace. "Don't you think we ought to tell him about the batteries, Harv?" Joe asked. "What about the batteries?" demanded Johnson with deadly calm. "A very small matter," Harvey said airily. "You see, we have been analyzing these broadcasts for three years. In that time, of course, the batteries are bound to weaken. I estimate these should last not less than one Terrestrial month, at the very least." "What do I do then?" Harvey shrugged. "Special batteries are required, which I see Joseph has by chance brought along. For the batteries, the only ones of their kind left in the system, I ask only what they cost—one hundred and ninety-nine buckos, no more and, on the other hand, no less." Johnson was breathing hard, and his hand hovered dangerously near his gun. But he paid the amount Harvey wanted. Moreover, he actually shook hands when the two panacea purveyors collected their six-armed prize and said goodbye. Before they were outside, however, he had turned on the radio and was listening tensely to a woman's highly cultured, though rather angry voice, saying: "Oh, you hannaforge are all beasa-taga-sanimort. If you rue amount it, how do you respench a pure woman to ansver go-samak—" "I'll get it!" they heard Johnson mutter. Then the sound of giant feet crossing the barroom floor reached their ears, and a shrill question: "What's that, Papa?" "A fortune, Jed! Those fakers are damned fools, selling us a thing like—" Joe gazed at Harvey admiringly. "Another one sold? Harv, that spiel pulls them in like an ether storm!" Together with the remarkable planetoid man, they reached the ship. Above them, dark, tumbling shapes blotted out the stars and silently moved on. Joe opened the gangway door. "Come on in, pal," he said to Genius. "We're shoving off." The planetoid man grinned foolishly. "Can't go arong with you," he said with an apologetic manner. "I rike to, but pressure fratten me out if I go." "What in solar blazes are you talking about?" Harvey asked. "I grow up on pranetoid," Genius explained. "On big pranet, too much pressure for me." The two salesmen looked narrowly at each other. "Did Johnson know that when he sold you?" Joe snarled. "Oh, sure." The silly grin became wider than ever. "Peopre from Earth buy me rots of times. I never reave pranetoid, though." "Joseph," Harvey said ominously, "that slick colonist has put one over upon us. What is our customary procedure in that event?" "We tear him apart," Joe replied between his teeth. "Not Mister Johnson," advised Genius. "Have gun and badge. He shoot you first and then rock you up in prison." Harvey paused, his ominous air vanishing. "True. There is also the fact, Joseph, that when he discovers the scrambled rectifier in the radio we sold him, he will have been paid back in full for his regrettable dishonesty." Unwillingly, Joe agreed. While Genius retreated to a safe distance, they entered the ship and blasted off. Within a few minutes the automatic steering pilot had maneuvered them above the plane of the asteroid belt. "I got kind of dizzy," Joe said, "there were so many deals back and forth. How much did we make on the sucker?" "A goodly amount, I wager," Harvey responded. He took out a pencil and paper. "Medicine, 469.50; radio, 1,000; batteries, 199. Total—let's see—1668 buckos and 50 redsents. A goodly sum, as I told you." He emptied his pockets of money, spread it out on the astrogation table and began counting. Finished, he looked up, troubled. "How much did we have when we landed, Joseph?" "Exactly 1668 buckos," Joe answered promptly. "I can't understand it," said Harvey. "Instead of double our capital, we now have only 1668 buckos and 50 redsents!" Feverishly, he returned to his pencil and paper. "Drinking water, 790; battery water, free; meal, 328; planetoid man, 550. Total: 1668 buckos!" He stared at the figures. "We paid out almost as much as we took in," he said bitterly. "Despite our intensive efforts, we made the absurd sum of fifty redsents." "Why, the dirty crook!" Joe growled. But after a few moments of sad reflection, Harvey became philosophical. "Perhaps, Joseph, we are more fortunate than we realize. We were, after all, completely in Johnson's power. The more I ponder, the more I believe we were lucky to escape. And, anyhow, we did make fifty redsents on the swindler. A moral victory, my boy." Joe, who had been sunk desparingly into a chair, now stood up slowly and asked: "Remember that bottle-opener we gave him?" "Certainly," Harvey explained. "What about it?" "How much did it cost us?" Harvey's eyebrows puckered. Suddenly he started laughing. "You're right, Joseph. We paid forty-six redsents for it on Venus. So, after all that transacting of business, we made four redsents!" "Four redsents, hell!" Joe snapped. "That was the sales tax!" He glared; then a smile lifted his mouth. "You remember those yokels on Mars' Flatlands, and the way they worshipped gold?" " Goldbricks! " Harvey said succinctly. Grinning, Joe set the robot-controls for Mars.

What is the significance of Genius?

1

Genius is an important character because he is used to illustrate just how brilliant Johnson is. The man is clearly intelligent because he has positioned himself as the sheriff, the barman, and the mayor of Planetoid 42. He also makes money by fooling gullible outsiders into paying high prices for water and food. However, his idea to sell Genius over and over again is perhaps the most shrewd. His asking price for the remarkable creature is in the 600s, much more than he’s able to charge for water or dishes at his restaurant. Johnson pretends that he’s attached to Genius and would hate to see him go, yet he cannot turn down the incredible sum of money. Each time Genius is sold to naive buyers, he ends up making his way right back to Johnson’s bar, and Johnson profits all of the money. Genius cannot leave the planet because the pressure in other habitats is too much for his unique body to handle. If one of the buyers insisted on bringing him aboard their ship, he would turn up dead and useless to them anyway. Therefore, they always send the poor creature back to Johnson and lose out on their plans to make loads of money off of him.

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Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net GRIFTERS' ASTEROID By H. L. GOLD Harvey and Joe were the slickest con-men ever to gyp a space-lane sucker. Or so they thought! Angus Johnson knew differently. He charged them five buckos for a glass of water—and got it! [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories May 1943. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Characteristically, Harvey Ellsworth tried to maintain his dignity, though his parched tongue was almost hanging out. But Joe Mallon, with no dignity to maintain, lurched across the rubbish-strewn patch of land that had been termed a spaceport. When Harvey staggered pontifically into the battered metalloy saloon—the only one on Planetoid 42—his tall, gangling partner was already stumbling out, mouthing something incoherent. They met in the doorway, violently. "We're delirious!" Joe cried. "It's a mirage!" "What is?" asked Harvey through a mouthful of cotton. Joe reeled aside, and Harvey saw what had upset his partner. He stared, speechless for once. In their hectic voyages from planet to planet, the pair of panacea purveyors had encountered the usual strange life-forms. But never had they seen anything like the amazing creature in that colonial saloon. Paying no attention to them, it was carrying a case of liquor in two hands, six siphons in two others, and a broom and dustpan in the remaining pair. The bartender, a big man resembling the plumpish Harvey in build, was leaning negligently on the counter, ordering this impossible being to fill the partly-emptied bottles, squeeze fruit juice and sweep the floor, all of which the native did simultaneously. "Nonsense," Harvey croaked uncertainly. "We have seen enough queer things to know there are always more." He led the way inside. Through thirst-cracked lips he rasped: "Water—quick!" Without a word, the bartender reached under the counter, brought out two glasses of water. The interplanetary con-men drank noisily, asked for more, until they had drunk eight glasses. Meanwhile, the bartender had taken out eight jiggers and filled them with whiskey. Harvey and Joe were breathing hard from having gulped the water so fast, but they were beginning to revive. They noticed the bartender's impersonal eyes studying them shrewdly. "Strangers, eh?" he asked at last. "Solar salesmen, my colonial friend," Harvey answered in his usual lush manner. "We purvey that renowned Martian remedy, La-anago Yergis , the formula for which was recently discovered by ourselves in the ancient ruined city of La-anago. Medical science is unanimous in proclaiming this magic medicine the sole panacea in the entire history of therapeutics." "Yeah?" said the bartender disinterestedly, polishing the chaser glasses without washing them. "Where you heading?" "Out of Mars for Ganymede. Our condenser broke down, and we've gone without water for five ghastly days." "Got a mechanic around this dumping ground you call a port?" Joe asked. "We did. He came near starving and moved on to Titan. Ships don't land here unless they're in trouble." "Then where's the water lead-in? We'll fill up and push off." "Mayor takes care of that," replied the saloon owner. "If you gents're finished at the bar, your drinks'll be forty buckos." Harvey grinned puzzledly. "We didn't take any whiskey." "Might as well. Water's five buckos a glass. Liquor's free with every chaser." Harvey's eyes bulged. Joe gulped. "That—that's robbery!" the lanky man managed to get out in a thin quaver. The barkeeper shrugged. "When there ain't many customers, you gotta make more on each one. Besides—" "Besides nothing!" Joe roared, finding his voice again. "You dirty crook—robbing poor spacemen! You—" "You dirty crook!" Joe roared. "Robbing honest spacemen!" Harvey nudged him warningly. "Easy, my boy, easy." He turned to the bartender apologetically. "Don't mind my friend. His adrenal glands are sometimes overactive. You were going to say—?" The round face of the barkeeper had assumed an aggrieved expression. "Folks are always thinkin' the other feller's out to do 'em," he said, shaking his head. "Lemme explain about the water here. It's bitter as some kinds of sin before it's purified. Have to bring it in with buckets and make it sweet. That takes time and labor. Waddya think—I was chargin' feller critters for water just out of devilment? I charge because I gotta." "Friend," said Harvey, taking out a wallet and counting off eight five-bucko bills, "here is your money. What's fair is fair, and you have put a different complexion on what seemed at first to be an unconscionable interjection of a middleman between Nature and man's thirst." The saloon man removed his dirty apron and came around the bar. "If that's an apology, I accept it. Now the mayor'll discuss filling your tanks. That's me. I'm also justice of the peace, official recorder, fire chief...." "And chief of police, no doubt," said Harvey jocosely. "Nope. That's my son, Jed. Angus Johnson's my name. Folks here just call me Chief. I run this town, and run it right. How much water will you need?" Joe estimated quickly. "About seventy-five liters, if we go on half rations," he answered. He waited apprehensively. "Let's say ten buckos a liter," the mayor said. "On account of the quantity, I'm able to quote a bargain price. Shucks, boys, it hurts me more to charge for water than it does for you to pay. I just got to, that's all." The mayor gestured to the native, who shuffled out to the tanks with them. The planetoid man worked the pump while the mayor intently watched the crude level-gauge, crying "Stop!" when it registered the proper amount. Then Johnson rubbed his thumb on his index finger and wetted his lips expectantly. Harvey bravely counted off the bills. He asked: "But what are we to do about replenishing our battery fluid? Ten buckos a liter would be preposterous. We simply can't afford it." Johnson's response almost floored them. "Who said anything about charging you for battery water? You can have all you want for nothing. It's just the purified stuff that comes so high." After giving them directions that would take them to the free-water pool, the ponderous factotum of Planetoid 42 shook hands and headed back to the saloon. His six-armed assistant followed him inside. "Now do you see, my hot-tempered colleague?" said Harvey as he and Joe picked up buckets that hung on the tank. "Johnson, as I saw instantly, is the victim of a difficult environment, and must charge accordingly." "Just the same," Joe griped, "paying for water isn't something you can get used to in ten minutes." In the fragile forest, they soon came across a stream that sprang from the igneous soil and splashed into the small pond whose contents, according to the mayor, was theirs for the asking. They filled their buckets and hauled them to the ship, then returned for more. It was on the sixth trip that Joe caught a glimpse of Jupiter-shine on a bright surface off to the left. The figure, 750, with the bucko sign in front of it, was still doing acrobatics inside his skull and keeping a faint suspicion alive in him. So he called Harvey and they went to investigate. Among the skimpy ground-crawling vines, they saw a long slender mound that was unmistakably a buried pipe. "What's this doing here?" Harvey asked, puzzled. "I thought Johnson had to transport water in pails." "Wonder where it leads to," Joe said uneasily. "It leads to the saloon," said Harvey, his eyes rapidly tracing the pipe back toward the spaceport. "What I am concerned with is where it leads from ." Five minutes later, panting heavily from the unaccustomed exertion of scrambling through the tangle of planetorial undergrowth, they burst into the open—before a clear, sparkling pool. Mutely, Harvey pointed out a pipe-end jutting under the water. "I am growing suspicious," he said in a rigidly controlled voice. But Joe was already on his knees, scooping up a handful of water and tasting it. "Sweet!" he snarled. They rushed back to the first pool, where Joe again tasted a sample. His mouth went wry. "Bitter! He uses only one pool, the sweet one! The only thing that needs purifying around here is that blasted mayor's conscience." "The asteroidal Poobah has tricked us with a slick come-on," said Harvey slowly. His eyes grew cold. "Joseph, the good-natured artist in me has become a hard and merciless avenger. I shall not rest until we have had the best of this colonial con-man! Watch your cues from this point hence." Fists clenched, the two returned to the saloon. But at the door they stopped and their fists unclenched. "Thought you gents were leaving," the mayor called out, seeing them frozen in the doorway. "Glad you didn't. Now you can meet my son, Jed. Him and me are the whole Earthman population of Johnson City." "You don't need any more," said Harvey, dismayed. Johnson's eight-foot son, topped by a massive roof of sun-bleached hair and held up by a foundation that seemed immovable, had obviously been born and raised in low gravity. For any decent-sized world would have kept him down near the general dimensions of a man. He held out an acre of palm. Harvey studied it worriedly, put his own hand somewhere on it, swallowed as it closed, then breathed again when his fingers were released in five units instead of a single compressed one. "Pleased to meet you," piped a voice that had never known a dense atmosphere. The pursuit of vengeance, Harvey realized, had taken a quick and unpleasant turn. Something shrewd was called for.... "Joseph!" he exclaimed, looking at his partner in alarm. "Don't you feel well?" Even before the others could turn to him, Joe's practiced eyes were gently crossing. He sagged against the door frame, all his features drooping like a bloodhound's. "Bring him in here!" Johnson cried. "I mean, get him away! He's coming down with asteroid fever!" "Of course," replied Harvey calmly. "Any fool knows the first symptoms of the disease that once scourged the universe." "What do you mean, once ?" demanded Johnson. "I come down with it every year, and I ain't hankering to have it in an off-season. Get him out of here!" "In good time. He can't be moved immediately." "Then he'll be here for months!" Harvey helped Joe to the counter and lifted him up on it. The mayor and his gigantic offspring were cowering across the room, trying to breathe in tiny, uncontaminating gasps. "You'll find everything you want in the back room," Johnson said frantically, "sulfopyridine, mustard plasters, rubs, inhalers, suction cups—" "Relics of the past," Harvey stated. "One medication is all modern man requires to combat the dread menace, asteroid fever." "What's that?" asked the mayor without conviction. Instead of replying, Harvey hurried outside to the ungainly second-hand rocket ship in the center of the shabby spaceport. He returned within a few minutes, carrying a bottle. Joe was still stretched out on the bar, panting, his eyes slowly crossing and uncrossing. Harvey lifted the patient's head tenderly, put the bottle to his lips and tilted it until he was forced to drink. When Joe tried to pull away, Harvey was inexorable. He made his partner drink until most of the liquid was gone. Then he stepped back and waited for the inevitable result. Joe's performance was better than ever. He lay supine for several moments, his face twisted into an expression that seemed doomed to perpetual wryness. Slowly, however, he sat up and his features straightened out. "Are—are you all right?" asked the mayor anxiously. "Much better," said Joe in a weak voice. "Maybe you need another dose," Harvey suggested. Joe recoiled. "I'm fine now!" he cried, and sprang off the bar to prove it. Astonished, Johnson and his son drew closer. They searched Joe's face, and then the mayor timidly felt his pulse. "Well, I'll be hanged!" Johnson ejaculated. " La-anago Yergis never fails, my friend," Harvey explained. "By actual test, it conquers asteroid fever in from four to twenty-three minutes, depending on the severity of the attack. Luckily, we caught this one before it grew formidable." The mayor's eyes became clouded mirrors of an inward conflict. "If you don't charge too much," he said warily, "I might think of buying some." "We do not sell this unbelievable remedy," Harvey replied with dignity. "It sells itself." "'Course, I'd expect a considerable reduction if I bought a whole case," said Johnson. "That would be the smallest investment you could make, compared with the vast loss of time and strength the fever involves." "How much?" asked the mayor unhappily. "For you, since you have taken us in so hospitably, a mere five hundred buckos." Johnson did not actually stagger back, but he gave the impression of doing so. "F-four hundred," he offered. "Not a red cent less than four seventy-five," Harvey said flatly. "Make it four fifty," quavered Johnson. "I dislike haggling," said Harvey. The final price, however, was four hundred and sixty-nine buckos and fifty redsents. Magnanimously, Harvey added: "And we will include, gratis , an elegant bottle-opener, a superb product of Mercurian handicraftsmanship." Johnson stabbed out a warning finger. "No tricks now. I want a taste of that stuff. You're not switching some worthless junk on me." Harvey took a glass from the bar and poured him a generous sample. The mayor sniffed it, grimaced, then threw it down his gullet. The ensuing minute saw a grim battle between a man and his stomach, a battle which the man gradually won. "There ain't no words for that taste," he gulped when it was safe to talk again. "Medicine," Harvey propounded, "should taste like medicine." To Joe he said: "Come, my esteemed colleague. We must perform the sacred task to which we have dedicated ourselves." With Joe stumbling along behind, he left the saloon, crossed the clearing and entered the ship. As soon as they were inside, Joe dropped his murderous silence and cried: "What kind of a dirty trick was that, giving me poison instead of that snake oil?" "That was not poison," Harvey contradicted quietly. "It was La-anago Yergis extract, plus." "Plus what—arsenic?" "Now, Joseph! Consider my quandary when I came back here to manufacture our specific for all known ailments, with the intention of selling yonder asteroidal tin-horn a bill of medical goods—an entire case, mind you. Was I to mix the extract with the water for which we had been swindled to the tune of ten buckos a liter? Where would our profit have been, then? No; I had to use the bitter free water, of course." "But why use it on me?" Joe demanded furiously. Harvey looked reprovingly at his gangling partner. "Did Johnson ask to taste it, or did he not? One must look ahead, Joseph. I had to produce the same medicine that we will now manufacture. Thus, you were a guinea pig for a splendid cause." "Okay, okay," Joe said. "But you shoulda charged him more." "Joseph, I promise you that we shall get back every redsent of which that swindler cheated us, besides whatever other funds or valuables he possesses. We could not be content with less." "Well, we're starting all right," admitted Joe. "How about that thing with six arms? He looks like a valuable. Can't we grab him off?" Harvey stopped filling bottles and looked up pensively. "I have every hope of luring away the profitable monstrosity. Apparently you have also surmised the fortune we could make with him. At first I purpose to exhibit him on our interplanetary tours with our streamlined panacea; he would be a spectacular attraction for bucolic suckers. Later, a brief period of demonstrating his abilities on the audio-visiphone. Then our triumph—we shall sell him at a stupendous figure to the zoo!" Joe was still dazed by that monetary vista when he and Harvey carried the case of medicine to the saloon. The mayor had already cleared a place of honor in the cluttered back room, where he told them to put it down carefully. Then he took the elaborate bottle-opener Harvey gave him, reverently uncorked a bottle and sampled it. It must have been at least as good as the first; he gagged. "That's the stuff, all right," he said, swallowing hard. He counted out the money into Harvey's hand, at a moderate rate that precariously balanced between his pleasure at getting the fever remedy and his pain at paying for it. Then he glanced out to see the position of Jupiter, and asked: "You gents eaten yet? The restaurant's open now." Harvey and Joe looked at each other. They hadn't been thinking about food at all, but suddenly they realized that they were hungry. "It's only water we were short of," Harvey said apprehensively. "We've got rations back at the ship." " H-mph! " the mayor grunted. "Powdered concentrates. Compressed pap. Suit yourselves. We treat our stomachs better here. And you're welcome to our hospitality." "Your hospitality," said Harvey, "depends on the prices you charge." "Well, if that's what's worrying you, you can stop worrying," answered the mayor promptly. "What's more, the kind of dinner I serve here you can't get anywhere else for any price." Swiftly, Harvey conned the possibilities of being bilked again. He saw none. "Let's take a look at the menu, anyhow, Joe," he said guardedly. Johnson immediately fell into the role of "mine host." "Come right in, gents," he invited. "Right into the dining room." He seated them at a table, which a rope tied between posts made more or less private, though nobody else was in the saloon and there was little chance of company. Genius, the six-armed native, appeared from the dingy kitchen with two menus in one hand, two glasses of water in another, plus napkins, silverware, a pitcher, plates, saucers, cups, and their cocktails, which were on the house. Then he stood by for orders. Harvey and Joe studied the menu critically. The prices were phenomenally low. When they glanced up at Johnson in perplexity, he grinned, bowed and asked: "Everything satisfactory, gents?" "Quite," said Harvey. "We shall order." For an hour they were served amazing dishes, both fresh and canned, the culinary wealth of this planetoid and all the system. And the service was as extraordinary as the meal itself. With four hands, Genius played deftly upon a pair of mellow Venusian viotars , using his other two hands for waiting on the table. "We absolutely must purchase this incredible specimen," Harvey whispered excitedly when Johnson and the native were both in the kitchen, attending to the next course. "He would make any society hostess's season a riotous success, which should be worth a great sum to women like Mrs. van Schuyler-Morgan, merely for his hire." "Think of a fast one fast," Joe agreed. "You're right." "But I dislike having to revise my opinion of a man so often," complained Harvey. "I wish Johnson would stay either swindler or honest merchant. This dinner is worth as least twenty buckos, yet I estimate our check at a mere bucko twenty redsents." The mayor's appearance prevented them from continuing the discussion. "It's been a great honor, gents," he said. "Ain't often I have visitors, and I like the best, like you two gents." As if on cue, Genius came out and put the check down between Joe and Harvey. Harvey picked it up negligently, but his casual air vanished in a yelp of horror. "What the devil is this?" he shouted.—"How do you arrive at this fantastic, idiotic figure— three hundred and twenty-eight buckos !" Johnson didn't answer. Neither did Genius; he simply put on the table, not a fingerbowl, but a magnifying glass. With one of his thirty fingers he pointed politely to the bottom of the menu. Harvey focused on the microscopic print, and his face went pasty with rage. The minute note read: "Services and entertainment, 327 buckos 80 redsents." "You can go to hell!" Joe growled. "We won't pay it!" Johnson sighed ponderously. "I was afraid you'd act like that," he said with regret. He pulled a tin badge out of his rear pocket, pinned it on his vest, and twisted his holstered gun into view. "Afraid I'll have to ask the sheriff to take over." Johnson, the "sheriff," collected the money, and Johnson, the "restaurateur," pocketed it. Meanwhile, Harvey tipped Joe the sign to remain calm. "My friend," he said to the mayor, and his tones took on a schoolmasterish severity, "your long absence from Earth has perhaps made you forget those elements of human wisdom that have entered the folk-lore of your native planet. Such as, for example: 'It is folly to kill a goose that lays golden eggs,' and 'Penny wise is pound foolish.'" "I don't get the connection," objected Johnson. "Well, by obliging us to pay such a high price for your dinner, you put out of your reach the chance of profiting from a really substantial deal. My partner and I were prepared to make you a sizable offer for the peculiar creature you call Genius. But by reducing our funds the way you have—" "Who said I wanted to sell him?" the mayor interrupted. He rubbed his fingers together and asked disinterestedly: "What were you going to offer, anyhow?" "It doesn't matter any longer," Harvey said with elaborate carelessness. "Perhaps you wouldn't have accepted it, anyway." "That's right," Johnson came back emphatically. "But what would your offer have been which I would have turned down?" "Which one? The one we were going to make, or the one we can make now?" "Either one. It don't make no difference. Genius is too valuable to sell." "Oh, come now, Mr. Johnson. Don't tell me no amount of money would tempt you!" "Nope. But how much did you say?" "Ah, then you will consider releasing Genius!" "Well, I'll tell you something," said the mayor confidentially. "When you've got one thing, you've got one thing. But when you've got money, it's the same as having a lot of things. Because, if you've got money, you can buy this and that and this and that and—" "This and that," concluded Joe. "We'll give you five hundred buckos." "Now, gents!" Johnson remonstrated. "Why, six hundred would hardly—" "You haven't left us much money," Harvey put in. The mayor frowned. "All right, we'll split the difference. Make it five-fifty." Harvey was quick to pay out, for this was a genuine windfall. Then he stood up and admired the astonishing possession he had so inexpensively acquired. "I really hate to deprive you of this unique creature," he said to Johnson. "I should imagine you will be rather lonely, with only your filial mammoth to keep you company." "I sure will," Johnson confessed glumly. "I got pretty attached to Genius, and I'm going to miss him something awful." Harvey forcibly removed his eyes from the native, who was clearing off the table almost all at once. "My friend," he said, "we take your only solace, it is true, but in his place we can offer something no less amazing and instructive." The mayor's hand went protectively to his pocket. "What is it?" he asked with the suspicion of a man who has seen human nature at its worst and expects nothing better. "Joseph, get our most prized belonging from the communications room of the ship," Harvey instructed. To Johnson he explained: "You must see the wondrous instrument before its value can be appreciated. My partner will soon have it here for your astonishment." Joe's face grew as glum as Johnson's had been. "Aw, Harv," he protested, "do we have to sell it? And right when I thought we were getting the key!" "We must not be selfish, my boy," Harvey said nobly. "We have had our chance; now we must relinquish Fate to the hands of a man who might have more success than we. Go, Joseph. Bring it here." Unwillingly, Joe turned and shuffled out. On a larger and heavier world than Planetoid 42, Johnson's curiosity would probably have had weight and mass. He was bursting with questions, but he was obviously afraid they would cost him money. For his part, Harvey allowed that curiosity to grow like a Venusian amoeba until Joe came in, lugging a radio. "Is that what you were talking about?" the mayor snorted. "What makes you think I want a radio? I came here to get away from singers and political speech-makers." "Do not jump to hasty conclusions," Harvey cautioned. "Another word, and I shall refuse you the greatest opportunity any man has ever had, with the sole exceptions of Joseph, myself and the unfortunate inventor of this absolutely awe-inspiring device." "I ain't in the market for a radio," Johnson said stubbornly. Harvey nodded in relief. "We have attempted to repay our host, Joseph. He has spurned our generosity. We have now the chance to continue our study, which I am positive will soon reward us with the key to an enormous fortune." "Well, that's no plating off our bow," Joe grunted. "I'm glad he did turn it down. I hated to give it up after working on it for three whole years." He picked up the radio and began walking toward the door. "Now, hold on!" the mayor cried. "I ain't saying I'll buy, but what is it I'm turning down?" Joe returned and set the instrument down on the bar. His face sorrowful, Harvey fondly stroked the scarred plasticoid cabinet. "To make a long story, Mr. Johnson," he said, "Joseph and I were among the chosen few who knew the famous Doctor Dean intimately. Just before his tragic death, you will recall, Dean allegedly went insane." He banged his fist on the bar. "I have said it before, and I repeat again, that was a malicious lie, spread by the doctor's enemies to discredit his greatest invention—this fourth dimensional radio!" "This what?" Johnson blurted out. "In simple terms," clarified Harvey, "the ingenious doctor discovered that the yawning chasm between the dimensions could be bridged by energy of all quanta. There has never been any question that the inhabitants of the super-dimension would be far more civilized than ourselves. Consequently, the man who could tap their knowledge would find himself in possession of a powerful, undreamt-of science!" The mayor looked respectfully at the silent box on the bar. "And this thing gets broadcasts from the fourth dimension?" "It does, Mr. Johnson! Only charlatans like those who envied Doctor Dean's magnificent accomplishments could deny that fact." The mayor put his hands in his pockets, unswiveled one hip and stared thoughtfully at the battered cabinet. "Well, let's say it picks up fourth dimensional broadcasts," he conceded. "But how could you understand what they're saying? Folks up there wouldn't talk our language." Again Harvey smashed his fist down. "Do you dare to repeat the scurvy lie that broke Dean's spirit and drove him to suicide?" Johnson recoiled. "No—no, of course not . I mean, being up here, I naturally couldn't get all the details." "Naturally," Harvey agreed, mollified. "I'm sorry I lost my temper. But it is a matter of record that the doctor proved the broadcasts emanating from the super-dimension were in English! Why should that be so difficult to believe? Is it impossible that at one time there was communication between the dimensions, that the super-beings admired our language and adopted it in all its beauty, adding to it their own hyper-scientific trimmings?" "Why, I don't know," Johnson said in confusion. "For three years, Joseph and I lost sleep and hair, trying to detect the simple key that would translate the somewhat metamorphosed broadcasts into our primitive English. It eluded us. Even the doctor failed. But that was understandable; a sensitive soul like his could stand only so much. And the combination of ridicule and failure to solve the mystery caused him to take his own life." Johnson winced. "Is that what you want to unload on me?" "For a very good reason, sir. Patience is the virtue that will be rewarded with the key to these fourth dimensional broadcasts. A man who could devote his life to improving this lonely worldlet is obviously a person with unusual patience." "Yeah," the mayor said grudgingly, "I ain't exactly flighty." "Therefore, you are the man who could unravel the problem!" Johnson asked skeptically: "How about a sample first?" Harvey turned a knob on the face of the scarred radio. After several squeals of spatial figures, a smooth voice began: "There are omnious pleajes of moby-hailegs in sonmirand which, howgraismon, are notch to be donfured miss ellasellabell in either or both hagasanipaj, by all means. This does not refly, on the brother man, nat or mizzafil saces are denuded by this ossifaligo...." Harvey switched off the set determinedly. "Wait a minute!" Johnson begged. "I almost got it then!" "I dislike being commercial," said Harvey, "but this astounding device still belongs to us. Would we not be foolish to let you discover the clue before purchasing the right to do so?" The mayor nodded indecisively, looking at the radio with agonized longing. "How much do you want?" he asked unhappily. "One thousand buckos, and no haggling. I am not in the mood." Johnson opened his mouth to argue; then, seeing Harvey's set features, paid with the worst possible grace. "Don't you think we ought to tell him about the batteries, Harv?" Joe asked. "What about the batteries?" demanded Johnson with deadly calm. "A very small matter," Harvey said airily. "You see, we have been analyzing these broadcasts for three years. In that time, of course, the batteries are bound to weaken. I estimate these should last not less than one Terrestrial month, at the very least." "What do I do then?" Harvey shrugged. "Special batteries are required, which I see Joseph has by chance brought along. For the batteries, the only ones of their kind left in the system, I ask only what they cost—one hundred and ninety-nine buckos, no more and, on the other hand, no less." Johnson was breathing hard, and his hand hovered dangerously near his gun. But he paid the amount Harvey wanted. Moreover, he actually shook hands when the two panacea purveyors collected their six-armed prize and said goodbye. Before they were outside, however, he had turned on the radio and was listening tensely to a woman's highly cultured, though rather angry voice, saying: "Oh, you hannaforge are all beasa-taga-sanimort. If you rue amount it, how do you respench a pure woman to ansver go-samak—" "I'll get it!" they heard Johnson mutter. Then the sound of giant feet crossing the barroom floor reached their ears, and a shrill question: "What's that, Papa?" "A fortune, Jed! Those fakers are damned fools, selling us a thing like—" Joe gazed at Harvey admiringly. "Another one sold? Harv, that spiel pulls them in like an ether storm!" Together with the remarkable planetoid man, they reached the ship. Above them, dark, tumbling shapes blotted out the stars and silently moved on. Joe opened the gangway door. "Come on in, pal," he said to Genius. "We're shoving off." The planetoid man grinned foolishly. "Can't go arong with you," he said with an apologetic manner. "I rike to, but pressure fratten me out if I go." "What in solar blazes are you talking about?" Harvey asked. "I grow up on pranetoid," Genius explained. "On big pranet, too much pressure for me." The two salesmen looked narrowly at each other. "Did Johnson know that when he sold you?" Joe snarled. "Oh, sure." The silly grin became wider than ever. "Peopre from Earth buy me rots of times. I never reave pranetoid, though." "Joseph," Harvey said ominously, "that slick colonist has put one over upon us. What is our customary procedure in that event?" "We tear him apart," Joe replied between his teeth. "Not Mister Johnson," advised Genius. "Have gun and badge. He shoot you first and then rock you up in prison." Harvey paused, his ominous air vanishing. "True. There is also the fact, Joseph, that when he discovers the scrambled rectifier in the radio we sold him, he will have been paid back in full for his regrettable dishonesty." Unwillingly, Joe agreed. While Genius retreated to a safe distance, they entered the ship and blasted off. Within a few minutes the automatic steering pilot had maneuvered them above the plane of the asteroid belt. "I got kind of dizzy," Joe said, "there were so many deals back and forth. How much did we make on the sucker?" "A goodly amount, I wager," Harvey responded. He took out a pencil and paper. "Medicine, 469.50; radio, 1,000; batteries, 199. Total—let's see—1668 buckos and 50 redsents. A goodly sum, as I told you." He emptied his pockets of money, spread it out on the astrogation table and began counting. Finished, he looked up, troubled. "How much did we have when we landed, Joseph?" "Exactly 1668 buckos," Joe answered promptly. "I can't understand it," said Harvey. "Instead of double our capital, we now have only 1668 buckos and 50 redsents!" Feverishly, he returned to his pencil and paper. "Drinking water, 790; battery water, free; meal, 328; planetoid man, 550. Total: 1668 buckos!" He stared at the figures. "We paid out almost as much as we took in," he said bitterly. "Despite our intensive efforts, we made the absurd sum of fifty redsents." "Why, the dirty crook!" Joe growled. But after a few moments of sad reflection, Harvey became philosophical. "Perhaps, Joseph, we are more fortunate than we realize. We were, after all, completely in Johnson's power. The more I ponder, the more I believe we were lucky to escape. And, anyhow, we did make fifty redsents on the swindler. A moral victory, my boy." Joe, who had been sunk desparingly into a chair, now stood up slowly and asked: "Remember that bottle-opener we gave him?" "Certainly," Harvey explained. "What about it?" "How much did it cost us?" Harvey's eyebrows puckered. Suddenly he started laughing. "You're right, Joseph. We paid forty-six redsents for it on Venus. So, after all that transacting of business, we made four redsents!" "Four redsents, hell!" Joe snapped. "That was the sales tax!" He glared; then a smile lifted his mouth. "You remember those yokels on Mars' Flatlands, and the way they worshipped gold?" " Goldbricks! " Harvey said succinctly. Grinning, Joe set the robot-controls for Mars.

What is the significance of Genius?

5

Genius is an alien being with 6 arms. He serves Johnson on Planetoid 42 as an all-around servant. He is coveted by and eventually purchased by Harvey and Joe to be exploited for profit off world. Unfortunately for the pair, after his purchase Genius explains that he cannot leave the planet because the higher atmospheric pressure of an off world environment would kill him. Johnson continually "sells" genius to unsuspecting visitors to the planet as a source of income only to have him return.

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Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net GRIFTERS' ASTEROID By H. L. GOLD Harvey and Joe were the slickest con-men ever to gyp a space-lane sucker. Or so they thought! Angus Johnson knew differently. He charged them five buckos for a glass of water—and got it! [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories May 1943. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Characteristically, Harvey Ellsworth tried to maintain his dignity, though his parched tongue was almost hanging out. But Joe Mallon, with no dignity to maintain, lurched across the rubbish-strewn patch of land that had been termed a spaceport. When Harvey staggered pontifically into the battered metalloy saloon—the only one on Planetoid 42—his tall, gangling partner was already stumbling out, mouthing something incoherent. They met in the doorway, violently. "We're delirious!" Joe cried. "It's a mirage!" "What is?" asked Harvey through a mouthful of cotton. Joe reeled aside, and Harvey saw what had upset his partner. He stared, speechless for once. In their hectic voyages from planet to planet, the pair of panacea purveyors had encountered the usual strange life-forms. But never had they seen anything like the amazing creature in that colonial saloon. Paying no attention to them, it was carrying a case of liquor in two hands, six siphons in two others, and a broom and dustpan in the remaining pair. The bartender, a big man resembling the plumpish Harvey in build, was leaning negligently on the counter, ordering this impossible being to fill the partly-emptied bottles, squeeze fruit juice and sweep the floor, all of which the native did simultaneously. "Nonsense," Harvey croaked uncertainly. "We have seen enough queer things to know there are always more." He led the way inside. Through thirst-cracked lips he rasped: "Water—quick!" Without a word, the bartender reached under the counter, brought out two glasses of water. The interplanetary con-men drank noisily, asked for more, until they had drunk eight glasses. Meanwhile, the bartender had taken out eight jiggers and filled them with whiskey. Harvey and Joe were breathing hard from having gulped the water so fast, but they were beginning to revive. They noticed the bartender's impersonal eyes studying them shrewdly. "Strangers, eh?" he asked at last. "Solar salesmen, my colonial friend," Harvey answered in his usual lush manner. "We purvey that renowned Martian remedy, La-anago Yergis , the formula for which was recently discovered by ourselves in the ancient ruined city of La-anago. Medical science is unanimous in proclaiming this magic medicine the sole panacea in the entire history of therapeutics." "Yeah?" said the bartender disinterestedly, polishing the chaser glasses without washing them. "Where you heading?" "Out of Mars for Ganymede. Our condenser broke down, and we've gone without water for five ghastly days." "Got a mechanic around this dumping ground you call a port?" Joe asked. "We did. He came near starving and moved on to Titan. Ships don't land here unless they're in trouble." "Then where's the water lead-in? We'll fill up and push off." "Mayor takes care of that," replied the saloon owner. "If you gents're finished at the bar, your drinks'll be forty buckos." Harvey grinned puzzledly. "We didn't take any whiskey." "Might as well. Water's five buckos a glass. Liquor's free with every chaser." Harvey's eyes bulged. Joe gulped. "That—that's robbery!" the lanky man managed to get out in a thin quaver. The barkeeper shrugged. "When there ain't many customers, you gotta make more on each one. Besides—" "Besides nothing!" Joe roared, finding his voice again. "You dirty crook—robbing poor spacemen! You—" "You dirty crook!" Joe roared. "Robbing honest spacemen!" Harvey nudged him warningly. "Easy, my boy, easy." He turned to the bartender apologetically. "Don't mind my friend. His adrenal glands are sometimes overactive. You were going to say—?" The round face of the barkeeper had assumed an aggrieved expression. "Folks are always thinkin' the other feller's out to do 'em," he said, shaking his head. "Lemme explain about the water here. It's bitter as some kinds of sin before it's purified. Have to bring it in with buckets and make it sweet. That takes time and labor. Waddya think—I was chargin' feller critters for water just out of devilment? I charge because I gotta." "Friend," said Harvey, taking out a wallet and counting off eight five-bucko bills, "here is your money. What's fair is fair, and you have put a different complexion on what seemed at first to be an unconscionable interjection of a middleman between Nature and man's thirst." The saloon man removed his dirty apron and came around the bar. "If that's an apology, I accept it. Now the mayor'll discuss filling your tanks. That's me. I'm also justice of the peace, official recorder, fire chief...." "And chief of police, no doubt," said Harvey jocosely. "Nope. That's my son, Jed. Angus Johnson's my name. Folks here just call me Chief. I run this town, and run it right. How much water will you need?" Joe estimated quickly. "About seventy-five liters, if we go on half rations," he answered. He waited apprehensively. "Let's say ten buckos a liter," the mayor said. "On account of the quantity, I'm able to quote a bargain price. Shucks, boys, it hurts me more to charge for water than it does for you to pay. I just got to, that's all." The mayor gestured to the native, who shuffled out to the tanks with them. The planetoid man worked the pump while the mayor intently watched the crude level-gauge, crying "Stop!" when it registered the proper amount. Then Johnson rubbed his thumb on his index finger and wetted his lips expectantly. Harvey bravely counted off the bills. He asked: "But what are we to do about replenishing our battery fluid? Ten buckos a liter would be preposterous. We simply can't afford it." Johnson's response almost floored them. "Who said anything about charging you for battery water? You can have all you want for nothing. It's just the purified stuff that comes so high." After giving them directions that would take them to the free-water pool, the ponderous factotum of Planetoid 42 shook hands and headed back to the saloon. His six-armed assistant followed him inside. "Now do you see, my hot-tempered colleague?" said Harvey as he and Joe picked up buckets that hung on the tank. "Johnson, as I saw instantly, is the victim of a difficult environment, and must charge accordingly." "Just the same," Joe griped, "paying for water isn't something you can get used to in ten minutes." In the fragile forest, they soon came across a stream that sprang from the igneous soil and splashed into the small pond whose contents, according to the mayor, was theirs for the asking. They filled their buckets and hauled them to the ship, then returned for more. It was on the sixth trip that Joe caught a glimpse of Jupiter-shine on a bright surface off to the left. The figure, 750, with the bucko sign in front of it, was still doing acrobatics inside his skull and keeping a faint suspicion alive in him. So he called Harvey and they went to investigate. Among the skimpy ground-crawling vines, they saw a long slender mound that was unmistakably a buried pipe. "What's this doing here?" Harvey asked, puzzled. "I thought Johnson had to transport water in pails." "Wonder where it leads to," Joe said uneasily. "It leads to the saloon," said Harvey, his eyes rapidly tracing the pipe back toward the spaceport. "What I am concerned with is where it leads from ." Five minutes later, panting heavily from the unaccustomed exertion of scrambling through the tangle of planetorial undergrowth, they burst into the open—before a clear, sparkling pool. Mutely, Harvey pointed out a pipe-end jutting under the water. "I am growing suspicious," he said in a rigidly controlled voice. But Joe was already on his knees, scooping up a handful of water and tasting it. "Sweet!" he snarled. They rushed back to the first pool, where Joe again tasted a sample. His mouth went wry. "Bitter! He uses only one pool, the sweet one! The only thing that needs purifying around here is that blasted mayor's conscience." "The asteroidal Poobah has tricked us with a slick come-on," said Harvey slowly. His eyes grew cold. "Joseph, the good-natured artist in me has become a hard and merciless avenger. I shall not rest until we have had the best of this colonial con-man! Watch your cues from this point hence." Fists clenched, the two returned to the saloon. But at the door they stopped and their fists unclenched. "Thought you gents were leaving," the mayor called out, seeing them frozen in the doorway. "Glad you didn't. Now you can meet my son, Jed. Him and me are the whole Earthman population of Johnson City." "You don't need any more," said Harvey, dismayed. Johnson's eight-foot son, topped by a massive roof of sun-bleached hair and held up by a foundation that seemed immovable, had obviously been born and raised in low gravity. For any decent-sized world would have kept him down near the general dimensions of a man. He held out an acre of palm. Harvey studied it worriedly, put his own hand somewhere on it, swallowed as it closed, then breathed again when his fingers were released in five units instead of a single compressed one. "Pleased to meet you," piped a voice that had never known a dense atmosphere. The pursuit of vengeance, Harvey realized, had taken a quick and unpleasant turn. Something shrewd was called for.... "Joseph!" he exclaimed, looking at his partner in alarm. "Don't you feel well?" Even before the others could turn to him, Joe's practiced eyes were gently crossing. He sagged against the door frame, all his features drooping like a bloodhound's. "Bring him in here!" Johnson cried. "I mean, get him away! He's coming down with asteroid fever!" "Of course," replied Harvey calmly. "Any fool knows the first symptoms of the disease that once scourged the universe." "What do you mean, once ?" demanded Johnson. "I come down with it every year, and I ain't hankering to have it in an off-season. Get him out of here!" "In good time. He can't be moved immediately." "Then he'll be here for months!" Harvey helped Joe to the counter and lifted him up on it. The mayor and his gigantic offspring were cowering across the room, trying to breathe in tiny, uncontaminating gasps. "You'll find everything you want in the back room," Johnson said frantically, "sulfopyridine, mustard plasters, rubs, inhalers, suction cups—" "Relics of the past," Harvey stated. "One medication is all modern man requires to combat the dread menace, asteroid fever." "What's that?" asked the mayor without conviction. Instead of replying, Harvey hurried outside to the ungainly second-hand rocket ship in the center of the shabby spaceport. He returned within a few minutes, carrying a bottle. Joe was still stretched out on the bar, panting, his eyes slowly crossing and uncrossing. Harvey lifted the patient's head tenderly, put the bottle to his lips and tilted it until he was forced to drink. When Joe tried to pull away, Harvey was inexorable. He made his partner drink until most of the liquid was gone. Then he stepped back and waited for the inevitable result. Joe's performance was better than ever. He lay supine for several moments, his face twisted into an expression that seemed doomed to perpetual wryness. Slowly, however, he sat up and his features straightened out. "Are—are you all right?" asked the mayor anxiously. "Much better," said Joe in a weak voice. "Maybe you need another dose," Harvey suggested. Joe recoiled. "I'm fine now!" he cried, and sprang off the bar to prove it. Astonished, Johnson and his son drew closer. They searched Joe's face, and then the mayor timidly felt his pulse. "Well, I'll be hanged!" Johnson ejaculated. " La-anago Yergis never fails, my friend," Harvey explained. "By actual test, it conquers asteroid fever in from four to twenty-three minutes, depending on the severity of the attack. Luckily, we caught this one before it grew formidable." The mayor's eyes became clouded mirrors of an inward conflict. "If you don't charge too much," he said warily, "I might think of buying some." "We do not sell this unbelievable remedy," Harvey replied with dignity. "It sells itself." "'Course, I'd expect a considerable reduction if I bought a whole case," said Johnson. "That would be the smallest investment you could make, compared with the vast loss of time and strength the fever involves." "How much?" asked the mayor unhappily. "For you, since you have taken us in so hospitably, a mere five hundred buckos." Johnson did not actually stagger back, but he gave the impression of doing so. "F-four hundred," he offered. "Not a red cent less than four seventy-five," Harvey said flatly. "Make it four fifty," quavered Johnson. "I dislike haggling," said Harvey. The final price, however, was four hundred and sixty-nine buckos and fifty redsents. Magnanimously, Harvey added: "And we will include, gratis , an elegant bottle-opener, a superb product of Mercurian handicraftsmanship." Johnson stabbed out a warning finger. "No tricks now. I want a taste of that stuff. You're not switching some worthless junk on me." Harvey took a glass from the bar and poured him a generous sample. The mayor sniffed it, grimaced, then threw it down his gullet. The ensuing minute saw a grim battle between a man and his stomach, a battle which the man gradually won. "There ain't no words for that taste," he gulped when it was safe to talk again. "Medicine," Harvey propounded, "should taste like medicine." To Joe he said: "Come, my esteemed colleague. We must perform the sacred task to which we have dedicated ourselves." With Joe stumbling along behind, he left the saloon, crossed the clearing and entered the ship. As soon as they were inside, Joe dropped his murderous silence and cried: "What kind of a dirty trick was that, giving me poison instead of that snake oil?" "That was not poison," Harvey contradicted quietly. "It was La-anago Yergis extract, plus." "Plus what—arsenic?" "Now, Joseph! Consider my quandary when I came back here to manufacture our specific for all known ailments, with the intention of selling yonder asteroidal tin-horn a bill of medical goods—an entire case, mind you. Was I to mix the extract with the water for which we had been swindled to the tune of ten buckos a liter? Where would our profit have been, then? No; I had to use the bitter free water, of course." "But why use it on me?" Joe demanded furiously. Harvey looked reprovingly at his gangling partner. "Did Johnson ask to taste it, or did he not? One must look ahead, Joseph. I had to produce the same medicine that we will now manufacture. Thus, you were a guinea pig for a splendid cause." "Okay, okay," Joe said. "But you shoulda charged him more." "Joseph, I promise you that we shall get back every redsent of which that swindler cheated us, besides whatever other funds or valuables he possesses. We could not be content with less." "Well, we're starting all right," admitted Joe. "How about that thing with six arms? He looks like a valuable. Can't we grab him off?" Harvey stopped filling bottles and looked up pensively. "I have every hope of luring away the profitable monstrosity. Apparently you have also surmised the fortune we could make with him. At first I purpose to exhibit him on our interplanetary tours with our streamlined panacea; he would be a spectacular attraction for bucolic suckers. Later, a brief period of demonstrating his abilities on the audio-visiphone. Then our triumph—we shall sell him at a stupendous figure to the zoo!" Joe was still dazed by that monetary vista when he and Harvey carried the case of medicine to the saloon. The mayor had already cleared a place of honor in the cluttered back room, where he told them to put it down carefully. Then he took the elaborate bottle-opener Harvey gave him, reverently uncorked a bottle and sampled it. It must have been at least as good as the first; he gagged. "That's the stuff, all right," he said, swallowing hard. He counted out the money into Harvey's hand, at a moderate rate that precariously balanced between his pleasure at getting the fever remedy and his pain at paying for it. Then he glanced out to see the position of Jupiter, and asked: "You gents eaten yet? The restaurant's open now." Harvey and Joe looked at each other. They hadn't been thinking about food at all, but suddenly they realized that they were hungry. "It's only water we were short of," Harvey said apprehensively. "We've got rations back at the ship." " H-mph! " the mayor grunted. "Powdered concentrates. Compressed pap. Suit yourselves. We treat our stomachs better here. And you're welcome to our hospitality." "Your hospitality," said Harvey, "depends on the prices you charge." "Well, if that's what's worrying you, you can stop worrying," answered the mayor promptly. "What's more, the kind of dinner I serve here you can't get anywhere else for any price." Swiftly, Harvey conned the possibilities of being bilked again. He saw none. "Let's take a look at the menu, anyhow, Joe," he said guardedly. Johnson immediately fell into the role of "mine host." "Come right in, gents," he invited. "Right into the dining room." He seated them at a table, which a rope tied between posts made more or less private, though nobody else was in the saloon and there was little chance of company. Genius, the six-armed native, appeared from the dingy kitchen with two menus in one hand, two glasses of water in another, plus napkins, silverware, a pitcher, plates, saucers, cups, and their cocktails, which were on the house. Then he stood by for orders. Harvey and Joe studied the menu critically. The prices were phenomenally low. When they glanced up at Johnson in perplexity, he grinned, bowed and asked: "Everything satisfactory, gents?" "Quite," said Harvey. "We shall order." For an hour they were served amazing dishes, both fresh and canned, the culinary wealth of this planetoid and all the system. And the service was as extraordinary as the meal itself. With four hands, Genius played deftly upon a pair of mellow Venusian viotars , using his other two hands for waiting on the table. "We absolutely must purchase this incredible specimen," Harvey whispered excitedly when Johnson and the native were both in the kitchen, attending to the next course. "He would make any society hostess's season a riotous success, which should be worth a great sum to women like Mrs. van Schuyler-Morgan, merely for his hire." "Think of a fast one fast," Joe agreed. "You're right." "But I dislike having to revise my opinion of a man so often," complained Harvey. "I wish Johnson would stay either swindler or honest merchant. This dinner is worth as least twenty buckos, yet I estimate our check at a mere bucko twenty redsents." The mayor's appearance prevented them from continuing the discussion. "It's been a great honor, gents," he said. "Ain't often I have visitors, and I like the best, like you two gents." As if on cue, Genius came out and put the check down between Joe and Harvey. Harvey picked it up negligently, but his casual air vanished in a yelp of horror. "What the devil is this?" he shouted.—"How do you arrive at this fantastic, idiotic figure— three hundred and twenty-eight buckos !" Johnson didn't answer. Neither did Genius; he simply put on the table, not a fingerbowl, but a magnifying glass. With one of his thirty fingers he pointed politely to the bottom of the menu. Harvey focused on the microscopic print, and his face went pasty with rage. The minute note read: "Services and entertainment, 327 buckos 80 redsents." "You can go to hell!" Joe growled. "We won't pay it!" Johnson sighed ponderously. "I was afraid you'd act like that," he said with regret. He pulled a tin badge out of his rear pocket, pinned it on his vest, and twisted his holstered gun into view. "Afraid I'll have to ask the sheriff to take over." Johnson, the "sheriff," collected the money, and Johnson, the "restaurateur," pocketed it. Meanwhile, Harvey tipped Joe the sign to remain calm. "My friend," he said to the mayor, and his tones took on a schoolmasterish severity, "your long absence from Earth has perhaps made you forget those elements of human wisdom that have entered the folk-lore of your native planet. Such as, for example: 'It is folly to kill a goose that lays golden eggs,' and 'Penny wise is pound foolish.'" "I don't get the connection," objected Johnson. "Well, by obliging us to pay such a high price for your dinner, you put out of your reach the chance of profiting from a really substantial deal. My partner and I were prepared to make you a sizable offer for the peculiar creature you call Genius. But by reducing our funds the way you have—" "Who said I wanted to sell him?" the mayor interrupted. He rubbed his fingers together and asked disinterestedly: "What were you going to offer, anyhow?" "It doesn't matter any longer," Harvey said with elaborate carelessness. "Perhaps you wouldn't have accepted it, anyway." "That's right," Johnson came back emphatically. "But what would your offer have been which I would have turned down?" "Which one? The one we were going to make, or the one we can make now?" "Either one. It don't make no difference. Genius is too valuable to sell." "Oh, come now, Mr. Johnson. Don't tell me no amount of money would tempt you!" "Nope. But how much did you say?" "Ah, then you will consider releasing Genius!" "Well, I'll tell you something," said the mayor confidentially. "When you've got one thing, you've got one thing. But when you've got money, it's the same as having a lot of things. Because, if you've got money, you can buy this and that and this and that and—" "This and that," concluded Joe. "We'll give you five hundred buckos." "Now, gents!" Johnson remonstrated. "Why, six hundred would hardly—" "You haven't left us much money," Harvey put in. The mayor frowned. "All right, we'll split the difference. Make it five-fifty." Harvey was quick to pay out, for this was a genuine windfall. Then he stood up and admired the astonishing possession he had so inexpensively acquired. "I really hate to deprive you of this unique creature," he said to Johnson. "I should imagine you will be rather lonely, with only your filial mammoth to keep you company." "I sure will," Johnson confessed glumly. "I got pretty attached to Genius, and I'm going to miss him something awful." Harvey forcibly removed his eyes from the native, who was clearing off the table almost all at once. "My friend," he said, "we take your only solace, it is true, but in his place we can offer something no less amazing and instructive." The mayor's hand went protectively to his pocket. "What is it?" he asked with the suspicion of a man who has seen human nature at its worst and expects nothing better. "Joseph, get our most prized belonging from the communications room of the ship," Harvey instructed. To Johnson he explained: "You must see the wondrous instrument before its value can be appreciated. My partner will soon have it here for your astonishment." Joe's face grew as glum as Johnson's had been. "Aw, Harv," he protested, "do we have to sell it? And right when I thought we were getting the key!" "We must not be selfish, my boy," Harvey said nobly. "We have had our chance; now we must relinquish Fate to the hands of a man who might have more success than we. Go, Joseph. Bring it here." Unwillingly, Joe turned and shuffled out. On a larger and heavier world than Planetoid 42, Johnson's curiosity would probably have had weight and mass. He was bursting with questions, but he was obviously afraid they would cost him money. For his part, Harvey allowed that curiosity to grow like a Venusian amoeba until Joe came in, lugging a radio. "Is that what you were talking about?" the mayor snorted. "What makes you think I want a radio? I came here to get away from singers and political speech-makers." "Do not jump to hasty conclusions," Harvey cautioned. "Another word, and I shall refuse you the greatest opportunity any man has ever had, with the sole exceptions of Joseph, myself and the unfortunate inventor of this absolutely awe-inspiring device." "I ain't in the market for a radio," Johnson said stubbornly. Harvey nodded in relief. "We have attempted to repay our host, Joseph. He has spurned our generosity. We have now the chance to continue our study, which I am positive will soon reward us with the key to an enormous fortune." "Well, that's no plating off our bow," Joe grunted. "I'm glad he did turn it down. I hated to give it up after working on it for three whole years." He picked up the radio and began walking toward the door. "Now, hold on!" the mayor cried. "I ain't saying I'll buy, but what is it I'm turning down?" Joe returned and set the instrument down on the bar. His face sorrowful, Harvey fondly stroked the scarred plasticoid cabinet. "To make a long story, Mr. Johnson," he said, "Joseph and I were among the chosen few who knew the famous Doctor Dean intimately. Just before his tragic death, you will recall, Dean allegedly went insane." He banged his fist on the bar. "I have said it before, and I repeat again, that was a malicious lie, spread by the doctor's enemies to discredit his greatest invention—this fourth dimensional radio!" "This what?" Johnson blurted out. "In simple terms," clarified Harvey, "the ingenious doctor discovered that the yawning chasm between the dimensions could be bridged by energy of all quanta. There has never been any question that the inhabitants of the super-dimension would be far more civilized than ourselves. Consequently, the man who could tap their knowledge would find himself in possession of a powerful, undreamt-of science!" The mayor looked respectfully at the silent box on the bar. "And this thing gets broadcasts from the fourth dimension?" "It does, Mr. Johnson! Only charlatans like those who envied Doctor Dean's magnificent accomplishments could deny that fact." The mayor put his hands in his pockets, unswiveled one hip and stared thoughtfully at the battered cabinet. "Well, let's say it picks up fourth dimensional broadcasts," he conceded. "But how could you understand what they're saying? Folks up there wouldn't talk our language." Again Harvey smashed his fist down. "Do you dare to repeat the scurvy lie that broke Dean's spirit and drove him to suicide?" Johnson recoiled. "No—no, of course not . I mean, being up here, I naturally couldn't get all the details." "Naturally," Harvey agreed, mollified. "I'm sorry I lost my temper. But it is a matter of record that the doctor proved the broadcasts emanating from the super-dimension were in English! Why should that be so difficult to believe? Is it impossible that at one time there was communication between the dimensions, that the super-beings admired our language and adopted it in all its beauty, adding to it their own hyper-scientific trimmings?" "Why, I don't know," Johnson said in confusion. "For three years, Joseph and I lost sleep and hair, trying to detect the simple key that would translate the somewhat metamorphosed broadcasts into our primitive English. It eluded us. Even the doctor failed. But that was understandable; a sensitive soul like his could stand only so much. And the combination of ridicule and failure to solve the mystery caused him to take his own life." Johnson winced. "Is that what you want to unload on me?" "For a very good reason, sir. Patience is the virtue that will be rewarded with the key to these fourth dimensional broadcasts. A man who could devote his life to improving this lonely worldlet is obviously a person with unusual patience." "Yeah," the mayor said grudgingly, "I ain't exactly flighty." "Therefore, you are the man who could unravel the problem!" Johnson asked skeptically: "How about a sample first?" Harvey turned a knob on the face of the scarred radio. After several squeals of spatial figures, a smooth voice began: "There are omnious pleajes of moby-hailegs in sonmirand which, howgraismon, are notch to be donfured miss ellasellabell in either or both hagasanipaj, by all means. This does not refly, on the brother man, nat or mizzafil saces are denuded by this ossifaligo...." Harvey switched off the set determinedly. "Wait a minute!" Johnson begged. "I almost got it then!" "I dislike being commercial," said Harvey, "but this astounding device still belongs to us. Would we not be foolish to let you discover the clue before purchasing the right to do so?" The mayor nodded indecisively, looking at the radio with agonized longing. "How much do you want?" he asked unhappily. "One thousand buckos, and no haggling. I am not in the mood." Johnson opened his mouth to argue; then, seeing Harvey's set features, paid with the worst possible grace. "Don't you think we ought to tell him about the batteries, Harv?" Joe asked. "What about the batteries?" demanded Johnson with deadly calm. "A very small matter," Harvey said airily. "You see, we have been analyzing these broadcasts for three years. In that time, of course, the batteries are bound to weaken. I estimate these should last not less than one Terrestrial month, at the very least." "What do I do then?" Harvey shrugged. "Special batteries are required, which I see Joseph has by chance brought along. For the batteries, the only ones of their kind left in the system, I ask only what they cost—one hundred and ninety-nine buckos, no more and, on the other hand, no less." Johnson was breathing hard, and his hand hovered dangerously near his gun. But he paid the amount Harvey wanted. Moreover, he actually shook hands when the two panacea purveyors collected their six-armed prize and said goodbye. Before they were outside, however, he had turned on the radio and was listening tensely to a woman's highly cultured, though rather angry voice, saying: "Oh, you hannaforge are all beasa-taga-sanimort. If you rue amount it, how do you respench a pure woman to ansver go-samak—" "I'll get it!" they heard Johnson mutter. Then the sound of giant feet crossing the barroom floor reached their ears, and a shrill question: "What's that, Papa?" "A fortune, Jed! Those fakers are damned fools, selling us a thing like—" Joe gazed at Harvey admiringly. "Another one sold? Harv, that spiel pulls them in like an ether storm!" Together with the remarkable planetoid man, they reached the ship. Above them, dark, tumbling shapes blotted out the stars and silently moved on. Joe opened the gangway door. "Come on in, pal," he said to Genius. "We're shoving off." The planetoid man grinned foolishly. "Can't go arong with you," he said with an apologetic manner. "I rike to, but pressure fratten me out if I go." "What in solar blazes are you talking about?" Harvey asked. "I grow up on pranetoid," Genius explained. "On big pranet, too much pressure for me." The two salesmen looked narrowly at each other. "Did Johnson know that when he sold you?" Joe snarled. "Oh, sure." The silly grin became wider than ever. "Peopre from Earth buy me rots of times. I never reave pranetoid, though." "Joseph," Harvey said ominously, "that slick colonist has put one over upon us. What is our customary procedure in that event?" "We tear him apart," Joe replied between his teeth. "Not Mister Johnson," advised Genius. "Have gun and badge. He shoot you first and then rock you up in prison." Harvey paused, his ominous air vanishing. "True. There is also the fact, Joseph, that when he discovers the scrambled rectifier in the radio we sold him, he will have been paid back in full for his regrettable dishonesty." Unwillingly, Joe agreed. While Genius retreated to a safe distance, they entered the ship and blasted off. Within a few minutes the automatic steering pilot had maneuvered them above the plane of the asteroid belt. "I got kind of dizzy," Joe said, "there were so many deals back and forth. How much did we make on the sucker?" "A goodly amount, I wager," Harvey responded. He took out a pencil and paper. "Medicine, 469.50; radio, 1,000; batteries, 199. Total—let's see—1668 buckos and 50 redsents. A goodly sum, as I told you." He emptied his pockets of money, spread it out on the astrogation table and began counting. Finished, he looked up, troubled. "How much did we have when we landed, Joseph?" "Exactly 1668 buckos," Joe answered promptly. "I can't understand it," said Harvey. "Instead of double our capital, we now have only 1668 buckos and 50 redsents!" Feverishly, he returned to his pencil and paper. "Drinking water, 790; battery water, free; meal, 328; planetoid man, 550. Total: 1668 buckos!" He stared at the figures. "We paid out almost as much as we took in," he said bitterly. "Despite our intensive efforts, we made the absurd sum of fifty redsents." "Why, the dirty crook!" Joe growled. But after a few moments of sad reflection, Harvey became philosophical. "Perhaps, Joseph, we are more fortunate than we realize. We were, after all, completely in Johnson's power. The more I ponder, the more I believe we were lucky to escape. And, anyhow, we did make fifty redsents on the swindler. A moral victory, my boy." Joe, who had been sunk desparingly into a chair, now stood up slowly and asked: "Remember that bottle-opener we gave him?" "Certainly," Harvey explained. "What about it?" "How much did it cost us?" Harvey's eyebrows puckered. Suddenly he started laughing. "You're right, Joseph. We paid forty-six redsents for it on Venus. So, after all that transacting of business, we made four redsents!" "Four redsents, hell!" Joe snapped. "That was the sales tax!" He glared; then a smile lifted his mouth. "You remember those yokels on Mars' Flatlands, and the way they worshipped gold?" " Goldbricks! " Harvey said succinctly. Grinning, Joe set the robot-controls for Mars.

What is the significance of Genius?

6

Genius is the many-armed native that works for Johnson and his son. His 30 fingers and dexterous abilities make him a hot commodity to Harvey and Joe. After they watch him bartend, using some hands to pour glasses, other to sweep the floor, and even more to complete other duties, they start brainstorming all the ways he could be helpful onboard their ship. Or, on the other hand, how much they could get for him once he’s sold. Eventually, Harvey and Joe decide to make an offer on Genius. Johnson sells his worker for a little over half a thousand buckos. Despite selling him to Harvey and Joe, Johnson forgot to include one minute detail. Genius is unable to leave their small planet, due to the gravity he grew up on. Any bigger atmospheric pressure would crush him. Genius is yet another example of the many cons Johnson pulled on Harvey and Joe.

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Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net GRIFTERS' ASTEROID By H. L. GOLD Harvey and Joe were the slickest con-men ever to gyp a space-lane sucker. Or so they thought! Angus Johnson knew differently. He charged them five buckos for a glass of water—and got it! [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories May 1943. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Characteristically, Harvey Ellsworth tried to maintain his dignity, though his parched tongue was almost hanging out. But Joe Mallon, with no dignity to maintain, lurched across the rubbish-strewn patch of land that had been termed a spaceport. When Harvey staggered pontifically into the battered metalloy saloon—the only one on Planetoid 42—his tall, gangling partner was already stumbling out, mouthing something incoherent. They met in the doorway, violently. "We're delirious!" Joe cried. "It's a mirage!" "What is?" asked Harvey through a mouthful of cotton. Joe reeled aside, and Harvey saw what had upset his partner. He stared, speechless for once. In their hectic voyages from planet to planet, the pair of panacea purveyors had encountered the usual strange life-forms. But never had they seen anything like the amazing creature in that colonial saloon. Paying no attention to them, it was carrying a case of liquor in two hands, six siphons in two others, and a broom and dustpan in the remaining pair. The bartender, a big man resembling the plumpish Harvey in build, was leaning negligently on the counter, ordering this impossible being to fill the partly-emptied bottles, squeeze fruit juice and sweep the floor, all of which the native did simultaneously. "Nonsense," Harvey croaked uncertainly. "We have seen enough queer things to know there are always more." He led the way inside. Through thirst-cracked lips he rasped: "Water—quick!" Without a word, the bartender reached under the counter, brought out two glasses of water. The interplanetary con-men drank noisily, asked for more, until they had drunk eight glasses. Meanwhile, the bartender had taken out eight jiggers and filled them with whiskey. Harvey and Joe were breathing hard from having gulped the water so fast, but they were beginning to revive. They noticed the bartender's impersonal eyes studying them shrewdly. "Strangers, eh?" he asked at last. "Solar salesmen, my colonial friend," Harvey answered in his usual lush manner. "We purvey that renowned Martian remedy, La-anago Yergis , the formula for which was recently discovered by ourselves in the ancient ruined city of La-anago. Medical science is unanimous in proclaiming this magic medicine the sole panacea in the entire history of therapeutics." "Yeah?" said the bartender disinterestedly, polishing the chaser glasses without washing them. "Where you heading?" "Out of Mars for Ganymede. Our condenser broke down, and we've gone without water for five ghastly days." "Got a mechanic around this dumping ground you call a port?" Joe asked. "We did. He came near starving and moved on to Titan. Ships don't land here unless they're in trouble." "Then where's the water lead-in? We'll fill up and push off." "Mayor takes care of that," replied the saloon owner. "If you gents're finished at the bar, your drinks'll be forty buckos." Harvey grinned puzzledly. "We didn't take any whiskey." "Might as well. Water's five buckos a glass. Liquor's free with every chaser." Harvey's eyes bulged. Joe gulped. "That—that's robbery!" the lanky man managed to get out in a thin quaver. The barkeeper shrugged. "When there ain't many customers, you gotta make more on each one. Besides—" "Besides nothing!" Joe roared, finding his voice again. "You dirty crook—robbing poor spacemen! You—" "You dirty crook!" Joe roared. "Robbing honest spacemen!" Harvey nudged him warningly. "Easy, my boy, easy." He turned to the bartender apologetically. "Don't mind my friend. His adrenal glands are sometimes overactive. You were going to say—?" The round face of the barkeeper had assumed an aggrieved expression. "Folks are always thinkin' the other feller's out to do 'em," he said, shaking his head. "Lemme explain about the water here. It's bitter as some kinds of sin before it's purified. Have to bring it in with buckets and make it sweet. That takes time and labor. Waddya think—I was chargin' feller critters for water just out of devilment? I charge because I gotta." "Friend," said Harvey, taking out a wallet and counting off eight five-bucko bills, "here is your money. What's fair is fair, and you have put a different complexion on what seemed at first to be an unconscionable interjection of a middleman between Nature and man's thirst." The saloon man removed his dirty apron and came around the bar. "If that's an apology, I accept it. Now the mayor'll discuss filling your tanks. That's me. I'm also justice of the peace, official recorder, fire chief...." "And chief of police, no doubt," said Harvey jocosely. "Nope. That's my son, Jed. Angus Johnson's my name. Folks here just call me Chief. I run this town, and run it right. How much water will you need?" Joe estimated quickly. "About seventy-five liters, if we go on half rations," he answered. He waited apprehensively. "Let's say ten buckos a liter," the mayor said. "On account of the quantity, I'm able to quote a bargain price. Shucks, boys, it hurts me more to charge for water than it does for you to pay. I just got to, that's all." The mayor gestured to the native, who shuffled out to the tanks with them. The planetoid man worked the pump while the mayor intently watched the crude level-gauge, crying "Stop!" when it registered the proper amount. Then Johnson rubbed his thumb on his index finger and wetted his lips expectantly. Harvey bravely counted off the bills. He asked: "But what are we to do about replenishing our battery fluid? Ten buckos a liter would be preposterous. We simply can't afford it." Johnson's response almost floored them. "Who said anything about charging you for battery water? You can have all you want for nothing. It's just the purified stuff that comes so high." After giving them directions that would take them to the free-water pool, the ponderous factotum of Planetoid 42 shook hands and headed back to the saloon. His six-armed assistant followed him inside. "Now do you see, my hot-tempered colleague?" said Harvey as he and Joe picked up buckets that hung on the tank. "Johnson, as I saw instantly, is the victim of a difficult environment, and must charge accordingly." "Just the same," Joe griped, "paying for water isn't something you can get used to in ten minutes." In the fragile forest, they soon came across a stream that sprang from the igneous soil and splashed into the small pond whose contents, according to the mayor, was theirs for the asking. They filled their buckets and hauled them to the ship, then returned for more. It was on the sixth trip that Joe caught a glimpse of Jupiter-shine on a bright surface off to the left. The figure, 750, with the bucko sign in front of it, was still doing acrobatics inside his skull and keeping a faint suspicion alive in him. So he called Harvey and they went to investigate. Among the skimpy ground-crawling vines, they saw a long slender mound that was unmistakably a buried pipe. "What's this doing here?" Harvey asked, puzzled. "I thought Johnson had to transport water in pails." "Wonder where it leads to," Joe said uneasily. "It leads to the saloon," said Harvey, his eyes rapidly tracing the pipe back toward the spaceport. "What I am concerned with is where it leads from ." Five minutes later, panting heavily from the unaccustomed exertion of scrambling through the tangle of planetorial undergrowth, they burst into the open—before a clear, sparkling pool. Mutely, Harvey pointed out a pipe-end jutting under the water. "I am growing suspicious," he said in a rigidly controlled voice. But Joe was already on his knees, scooping up a handful of water and tasting it. "Sweet!" he snarled. They rushed back to the first pool, where Joe again tasted a sample. His mouth went wry. "Bitter! He uses only one pool, the sweet one! The only thing that needs purifying around here is that blasted mayor's conscience." "The asteroidal Poobah has tricked us with a slick come-on," said Harvey slowly. His eyes grew cold. "Joseph, the good-natured artist in me has become a hard and merciless avenger. I shall not rest until we have had the best of this colonial con-man! Watch your cues from this point hence." Fists clenched, the two returned to the saloon. But at the door they stopped and their fists unclenched. "Thought you gents were leaving," the mayor called out, seeing them frozen in the doorway. "Glad you didn't. Now you can meet my son, Jed. Him and me are the whole Earthman population of Johnson City." "You don't need any more," said Harvey, dismayed. Johnson's eight-foot son, topped by a massive roof of sun-bleached hair and held up by a foundation that seemed immovable, had obviously been born and raised in low gravity. For any decent-sized world would have kept him down near the general dimensions of a man. He held out an acre of palm. Harvey studied it worriedly, put his own hand somewhere on it, swallowed as it closed, then breathed again when his fingers were released in five units instead of a single compressed one. "Pleased to meet you," piped a voice that had never known a dense atmosphere. The pursuit of vengeance, Harvey realized, had taken a quick and unpleasant turn. Something shrewd was called for.... "Joseph!" he exclaimed, looking at his partner in alarm. "Don't you feel well?" Even before the others could turn to him, Joe's practiced eyes were gently crossing. He sagged against the door frame, all his features drooping like a bloodhound's. "Bring him in here!" Johnson cried. "I mean, get him away! He's coming down with asteroid fever!" "Of course," replied Harvey calmly. "Any fool knows the first symptoms of the disease that once scourged the universe." "What do you mean, once ?" demanded Johnson. "I come down with it every year, and I ain't hankering to have it in an off-season. Get him out of here!" "In good time. He can't be moved immediately." "Then he'll be here for months!" Harvey helped Joe to the counter and lifted him up on it. The mayor and his gigantic offspring were cowering across the room, trying to breathe in tiny, uncontaminating gasps. "You'll find everything you want in the back room," Johnson said frantically, "sulfopyridine, mustard plasters, rubs, inhalers, suction cups—" "Relics of the past," Harvey stated. "One medication is all modern man requires to combat the dread menace, asteroid fever." "What's that?" asked the mayor without conviction. Instead of replying, Harvey hurried outside to the ungainly second-hand rocket ship in the center of the shabby spaceport. He returned within a few minutes, carrying a bottle. Joe was still stretched out on the bar, panting, his eyes slowly crossing and uncrossing. Harvey lifted the patient's head tenderly, put the bottle to his lips and tilted it until he was forced to drink. When Joe tried to pull away, Harvey was inexorable. He made his partner drink until most of the liquid was gone. Then he stepped back and waited for the inevitable result. Joe's performance was better than ever. He lay supine for several moments, his face twisted into an expression that seemed doomed to perpetual wryness. Slowly, however, he sat up and his features straightened out. "Are—are you all right?" asked the mayor anxiously. "Much better," said Joe in a weak voice. "Maybe you need another dose," Harvey suggested. Joe recoiled. "I'm fine now!" he cried, and sprang off the bar to prove it. Astonished, Johnson and his son drew closer. They searched Joe's face, and then the mayor timidly felt his pulse. "Well, I'll be hanged!" Johnson ejaculated. " La-anago Yergis never fails, my friend," Harvey explained. "By actual test, it conquers asteroid fever in from four to twenty-three minutes, depending on the severity of the attack. Luckily, we caught this one before it grew formidable." The mayor's eyes became clouded mirrors of an inward conflict. "If you don't charge too much," he said warily, "I might think of buying some." "We do not sell this unbelievable remedy," Harvey replied with dignity. "It sells itself." "'Course, I'd expect a considerable reduction if I bought a whole case," said Johnson. "That would be the smallest investment you could make, compared with the vast loss of time and strength the fever involves." "How much?" asked the mayor unhappily. "For you, since you have taken us in so hospitably, a mere five hundred buckos." Johnson did not actually stagger back, but he gave the impression of doing so. "F-four hundred," he offered. "Not a red cent less than four seventy-five," Harvey said flatly. "Make it four fifty," quavered Johnson. "I dislike haggling," said Harvey. The final price, however, was four hundred and sixty-nine buckos and fifty redsents. Magnanimously, Harvey added: "And we will include, gratis , an elegant bottle-opener, a superb product of Mercurian handicraftsmanship." Johnson stabbed out a warning finger. "No tricks now. I want a taste of that stuff. You're not switching some worthless junk on me." Harvey took a glass from the bar and poured him a generous sample. The mayor sniffed it, grimaced, then threw it down his gullet. The ensuing minute saw a grim battle between a man and his stomach, a battle which the man gradually won. "There ain't no words for that taste," he gulped when it was safe to talk again. "Medicine," Harvey propounded, "should taste like medicine." To Joe he said: "Come, my esteemed colleague. We must perform the sacred task to which we have dedicated ourselves." With Joe stumbling along behind, he left the saloon, crossed the clearing and entered the ship. As soon as they were inside, Joe dropped his murderous silence and cried: "What kind of a dirty trick was that, giving me poison instead of that snake oil?" "That was not poison," Harvey contradicted quietly. "It was La-anago Yergis extract, plus." "Plus what—arsenic?" "Now, Joseph! Consider my quandary when I came back here to manufacture our specific for all known ailments, with the intention of selling yonder asteroidal tin-horn a bill of medical goods—an entire case, mind you. Was I to mix the extract with the water for which we had been swindled to the tune of ten buckos a liter? Where would our profit have been, then? No; I had to use the bitter free water, of course." "But why use it on me?" Joe demanded furiously. Harvey looked reprovingly at his gangling partner. "Did Johnson ask to taste it, or did he not? One must look ahead, Joseph. I had to produce the same medicine that we will now manufacture. Thus, you were a guinea pig for a splendid cause." "Okay, okay," Joe said. "But you shoulda charged him more." "Joseph, I promise you that we shall get back every redsent of which that swindler cheated us, besides whatever other funds or valuables he possesses. We could not be content with less." "Well, we're starting all right," admitted Joe. "How about that thing with six arms? He looks like a valuable. Can't we grab him off?" Harvey stopped filling bottles and looked up pensively. "I have every hope of luring away the profitable monstrosity. Apparently you have also surmised the fortune we could make with him. At first I purpose to exhibit him on our interplanetary tours with our streamlined panacea; he would be a spectacular attraction for bucolic suckers. Later, a brief period of demonstrating his abilities on the audio-visiphone. Then our triumph—we shall sell him at a stupendous figure to the zoo!" Joe was still dazed by that monetary vista when he and Harvey carried the case of medicine to the saloon. The mayor had already cleared a place of honor in the cluttered back room, where he told them to put it down carefully. Then he took the elaborate bottle-opener Harvey gave him, reverently uncorked a bottle and sampled it. It must have been at least as good as the first; he gagged. "That's the stuff, all right," he said, swallowing hard. He counted out the money into Harvey's hand, at a moderate rate that precariously balanced between his pleasure at getting the fever remedy and his pain at paying for it. Then he glanced out to see the position of Jupiter, and asked: "You gents eaten yet? The restaurant's open now." Harvey and Joe looked at each other. They hadn't been thinking about food at all, but suddenly they realized that they were hungry. "It's only water we were short of," Harvey said apprehensively. "We've got rations back at the ship." " H-mph! " the mayor grunted. "Powdered concentrates. Compressed pap. Suit yourselves. We treat our stomachs better here. And you're welcome to our hospitality." "Your hospitality," said Harvey, "depends on the prices you charge." "Well, if that's what's worrying you, you can stop worrying," answered the mayor promptly. "What's more, the kind of dinner I serve here you can't get anywhere else for any price." Swiftly, Harvey conned the possibilities of being bilked again. He saw none. "Let's take a look at the menu, anyhow, Joe," he said guardedly. Johnson immediately fell into the role of "mine host." "Come right in, gents," he invited. "Right into the dining room." He seated them at a table, which a rope tied between posts made more or less private, though nobody else was in the saloon and there was little chance of company. Genius, the six-armed native, appeared from the dingy kitchen with two menus in one hand, two glasses of water in another, plus napkins, silverware, a pitcher, plates, saucers, cups, and their cocktails, which were on the house. Then he stood by for orders. Harvey and Joe studied the menu critically. The prices were phenomenally low. When they glanced up at Johnson in perplexity, he grinned, bowed and asked: "Everything satisfactory, gents?" "Quite," said Harvey. "We shall order." For an hour they were served amazing dishes, both fresh and canned, the culinary wealth of this planetoid and all the system. And the service was as extraordinary as the meal itself. With four hands, Genius played deftly upon a pair of mellow Venusian viotars , using his other two hands for waiting on the table. "We absolutely must purchase this incredible specimen," Harvey whispered excitedly when Johnson and the native were both in the kitchen, attending to the next course. "He would make any society hostess's season a riotous success, which should be worth a great sum to women like Mrs. van Schuyler-Morgan, merely for his hire." "Think of a fast one fast," Joe agreed. "You're right." "But I dislike having to revise my opinion of a man so often," complained Harvey. "I wish Johnson would stay either swindler or honest merchant. This dinner is worth as least twenty buckos, yet I estimate our check at a mere bucko twenty redsents." The mayor's appearance prevented them from continuing the discussion. "It's been a great honor, gents," he said. "Ain't often I have visitors, and I like the best, like you two gents." As if on cue, Genius came out and put the check down between Joe and Harvey. Harvey picked it up negligently, but his casual air vanished in a yelp of horror. "What the devil is this?" he shouted.—"How do you arrive at this fantastic, idiotic figure— three hundred and twenty-eight buckos !" Johnson didn't answer. Neither did Genius; he simply put on the table, not a fingerbowl, but a magnifying glass. With one of his thirty fingers he pointed politely to the bottom of the menu. Harvey focused on the microscopic print, and his face went pasty with rage. The minute note read: "Services and entertainment, 327 buckos 80 redsents." "You can go to hell!" Joe growled. "We won't pay it!" Johnson sighed ponderously. "I was afraid you'd act like that," he said with regret. He pulled a tin badge out of his rear pocket, pinned it on his vest, and twisted his holstered gun into view. "Afraid I'll have to ask the sheriff to take over." Johnson, the "sheriff," collected the money, and Johnson, the "restaurateur," pocketed it. Meanwhile, Harvey tipped Joe the sign to remain calm. "My friend," he said to the mayor, and his tones took on a schoolmasterish severity, "your long absence from Earth has perhaps made you forget those elements of human wisdom that have entered the folk-lore of your native planet. Such as, for example: 'It is folly to kill a goose that lays golden eggs,' and 'Penny wise is pound foolish.'" "I don't get the connection," objected Johnson. "Well, by obliging us to pay such a high price for your dinner, you put out of your reach the chance of profiting from a really substantial deal. My partner and I were prepared to make you a sizable offer for the peculiar creature you call Genius. But by reducing our funds the way you have—" "Who said I wanted to sell him?" the mayor interrupted. He rubbed his fingers together and asked disinterestedly: "What were you going to offer, anyhow?" "It doesn't matter any longer," Harvey said with elaborate carelessness. "Perhaps you wouldn't have accepted it, anyway." "That's right," Johnson came back emphatically. "But what would your offer have been which I would have turned down?" "Which one? The one we were going to make, or the one we can make now?" "Either one. It don't make no difference. Genius is too valuable to sell." "Oh, come now, Mr. Johnson. Don't tell me no amount of money would tempt you!" "Nope. But how much did you say?" "Ah, then you will consider releasing Genius!" "Well, I'll tell you something," said the mayor confidentially. "When you've got one thing, you've got one thing. But when you've got money, it's the same as having a lot of things. Because, if you've got money, you can buy this and that and this and that and—" "This and that," concluded Joe. "We'll give you five hundred buckos." "Now, gents!" Johnson remonstrated. "Why, six hundred would hardly—" "You haven't left us much money," Harvey put in. The mayor frowned. "All right, we'll split the difference. Make it five-fifty." Harvey was quick to pay out, for this was a genuine windfall. Then he stood up and admired the astonishing possession he had so inexpensively acquired. "I really hate to deprive you of this unique creature," he said to Johnson. "I should imagine you will be rather lonely, with only your filial mammoth to keep you company." "I sure will," Johnson confessed glumly. "I got pretty attached to Genius, and I'm going to miss him something awful." Harvey forcibly removed his eyes from the native, who was clearing off the table almost all at once. "My friend," he said, "we take your only solace, it is true, but in his place we can offer something no less amazing and instructive." The mayor's hand went protectively to his pocket. "What is it?" he asked with the suspicion of a man who has seen human nature at its worst and expects nothing better. "Joseph, get our most prized belonging from the communications room of the ship," Harvey instructed. To Johnson he explained: "You must see the wondrous instrument before its value can be appreciated. My partner will soon have it here for your astonishment." Joe's face grew as glum as Johnson's had been. "Aw, Harv," he protested, "do we have to sell it? And right when I thought we were getting the key!" "We must not be selfish, my boy," Harvey said nobly. "We have had our chance; now we must relinquish Fate to the hands of a man who might have more success than we. Go, Joseph. Bring it here." Unwillingly, Joe turned and shuffled out. On a larger and heavier world than Planetoid 42, Johnson's curiosity would probably have had weight and mass. He was bursting with questions, but he was obviously afraid they would cost him money. For his part, Harvey allowed that curiosity to grow like a Venusian amoeba until Joe came in, lugging a radio. "Is that what you were talking about?" the mayor snorted. "What makes you think I want a radio? I came here to get away from singers and political speech-makers." "Do not jump to hasty conclusions," Harvey cautioned. "Another word, and I shall refuse you the greatest opportunity any man has ever had, with the sole exceptions of Joseph, myself and the unfortunate inventor of this absolutely awe-inspiring device." "I ain't in the market for a radio," Johnson said stubbornly. Harvey nodded in relief. "We have attempted to repay our host, Joseph. He has spurned our generosity. We have now the chance to continue our study, which I am positive will soon reward us with the key to an enormous fortune." "Well, that's no plating off our bow," Joe grunted. "I'm glad he did turn it down. I hated to give it up after working on it for three whole years." He picked up the radio and began walking toward the door. "Now, hold on!" the mayor cried. "I ain't saying I'll buy, but what is it I'm turning down?" Joe returned and set the instrument down on the bar. His face sorrowful, Harvey fondly stroked the scarred plasticoid cabinet. "To make a long story, Mr. Johnson," he said, "Joseph and I were among the chosen few who knew the famous Doctor Dean intimately. Just before his tragic death, you will recall, Dean allegedly went insane." He banged his fist on the bar. "I have said it before, and I repeat again, that was a malicious lie, spread by the doctor's enemies to discredit his greatest invention—this fourth dimensional radio!" "This what?" Johnson blurted out. "In simple terms," clarified Harvey, "the ingenious doctor discovered that the yawning chasm between the dimensions could be bridged by energy of all quanta. There has never been any question that the inhabitants of the super-dimension would be far more civilized than ourselves. Consequently, the man who could tap their knowledge would find himself in possession of a powerful, undreamt-of science!" The mayor looked respectfully at the silent box on the bar. "And this thing gets broadcasts from the fourth dimension?" "It does, Mr. Johnson! Only charlatans like those who envied Doctor Dean's magnificent accomplishments could deny that fact." The mayor put his hands in his pockets, unswiveled one hip and stared thoughtfully at the battered cabinet. "Well, let's say it picks up fourth dimensional broadcasts," he conceded. "But how could you understand what they're saying? Folks up there wouldn't talk our language." Again Harvey smashed his fist down. "Do you dare to repeat the scurvy lie that broke Dean's spirit and drove him to suicide?" Johnson recoiled. "No—no, of course not . I mean, being up here, I naturally couldn't get all the details." "Naturally," Harvey agreed, mollified. "I'm sorry I lost my temper. But it is a matter of record that the doctor proved the broadcasts emanating from the super-dimension were in English! Why should that be so difficult to believe? Is it impossible that at one time there was communication between the dimensions, that the super-beings admired our language and adopted it in all its beauty, adding to it their own hyper-scientific trimmings?" "Why, I don't know," Johnson said in confusion. "For three years, Joseph and I lost sleep and hair, trying to detect the simple key that would translate the somewhat metamorphosed broadcasts into our primitive English. It eluded us. Even the doctor failed. But that was understandable; a sensitive soul like his could stand only so much. And the combination of ridicule and failure to solve the mystery caused him to take his own life." Johnson winced. "Is that what you want to unload on me?" "For a very good reason, sir. Patience is the virtue that will be rewarded with the key to these fourth dimensional broadcasts. A man who could devote his life to improving this lonely worldlet is obviously a person with unusual patience." "Yeah," the mayor said grudgingly, "I ain't exactly flighty." "Therefore, you are the man who could unravel the problem!" Johnson asked skeptically: "How about a sample first?" Harvey turned a knob on the face of the scarred radio. After several squeals of spatial figures, a smooth voice began: "There are omnious pleajes of moby-hailegs in sonmirand which, howgraismon, are notch to be donfured miss ellasellabell in either or both hagasanipaj, by all means. This does not refly, on the brother man, nat or mizzafil saces are denuded by this ossifaligo...." Harvey switched off the set determinedly. "Wait a minute!" Johnson begged. "I almost got it then!" "I dislike being commercial," said Harvey, "but this astounding device still belongs to us. Would we not be foolish to let you discover the clue before purchasing the right to do so?" The mayor nodded indecisively, looking at the radio with agonized longing. "How much do you want?" he asked unhappily. "One thousand buckos, and no haggling. I am not in the mood." Johnson opened his mouth to argue; then, seeing Harvey's set features, paid with the worst possible grace. "Don't you think we ought to tell him about the batteries, Harv?" Joe asked. "What about the batteries?" demanded Johnson with deadly calm. "A very small matter," Harvey said airily. "You see, we have been analyzing these broadcasts for three years. In that time, of course, the batteries are bound to weaken. I estimate these should last not less than one Terrestrial month, at the very least." "What do I do then?" Harvey shrugged. "Special batteries are required, which I see Joseph has by chance brought along. For the batteries, the only ones of their kind left in the system, I ask only what they cost—one hundred and ninety-nine buckos, no more and, on the other hand, no less." Johnson was breathing hard, and his hand hovered dangerously near his gun. But he paid the amount Harvey wanted. Moreover, he actually shook hands when the two panacea purveyors collected their six-armed prize and said goodbye. Before they were outside, however, he had turned on the radio and was listening tensely to a woman's highly cultured, though rather angry voice, saying: "Oh, you hannaforge are all beasa-taga-sanimort. If you rue amount it, how do you respench a pure woman to ansver go-samak—" "I'll get it!" they heard Johnson mutter. Then the sound of giant feet crossing the barroom floor reached their ears, and a shrill question: "What's that, Papa?" "A fortune, Jed! Those fakers are damned fools, selling us a thing like—" Joe gazed at Harvey admiringly. "Another one sold? Harv, that spiel pulls them in like an ether storm!" Together with the remarkable planetoid man, they reached the ship. Above them, dark, tumbling shapes blotted out the stars and silently moved on. Joe opened the gangway door. "Come on in, pal," he said to Genius. "We're shoving off." The planetoid man grinned foolishly. "Can't go arong with you," he said with an apologetic manner. "I rike to, but pressure fratten me out if I go." "What in solar blazes are you talking about?" Harvey asked. "I grow up on pranetoid," Genius explained. "On big pranet, too much pressure for me." The two salesmen looked narrowly at each other. "Did Johnson know that when he sold you?" Joe snarled. "Oh, sure." The silly grin became wider than ever. "Peopre from Earth buy me rots of times. I never reave pranetoid, though." "Joseph," Harvey said ominously, "that slick colonist has put one over upon us. What is our customary procedure in that event?" "We tear him apart," Joe replied between his teeth. "Not Mister Johnson," advised Genius. "Have gun and badge. He shoot you first and then rock you up in prison." Harvey paused, his ominous air vanishing. "True. There is also the fact, Joseph, that when he discovers the scrambled rectifier in the radio we sold him, he will have been paid back in full for his regrettable dishonesty." Unwillingly, Joe agreed. While Genius retreated to a safe distance, they entered the ship and blasted off. Within a few minutes the automatic steering pilot had maneuvered them above the plane of the asteroid belt. "I got kind of dizzy," Joe said, "there were so many deals back and forth. How much did we make on the sucker?" "A goodly amount, I wager," Harvey responded. He took out a pencil and paper. "Medicine, 469.50; radio, 1,000; batteries, 199. Total—let's see—1668 buckos and 50 redsents. A goodly sum, as I told you." He emptied his pockets of money, spread it out on the astrogation table and began counting. Finished, he looked up, troubled. "How much did we have when we landed, Joseph?" "Exactly 1668 buckos," Joe answered promptly. "I can't understand it," said Harvey. "Instead of double our capital, we now have only 1668 buckos and 50 redsents!" Feverishly, he returned to his pencil and paper. "Drinking water, 790; battery water, free; meal, 328; planetoid man, 550. Total: 1668 buckos!" He stared at the figures. "We paid out almost as much as we took in," he said bitterly. "Despite our intensive efforts, we made the absurd sum of fifty redsents." "Why, the dirty crook!" Joe growled. But after a few moments of sad reflection, Harvey became philosophical. "Perhaps, Joseph, we are more fortunate than we realize. We were, after all, completely in Johnson's power. The more I ponder, the more I believe we were lucky to escape. And, anyhow, we did make fifty redsents on the swindler. A moral victory, my boy." Joe, who had been sunk desparingly into a chair, now stood up slowly and asked: "Remember that bottle-opener we gave him?" "Certainly," Harvey explained. "What about it?" "How much did it cost us?" Harvey's eyebrows puckered. Suddenly he started laughing. "You're right, Joseph. We paid forty-six redsents for it on Venus. So, after all that transacting of business, we made four redsents!" "Four redsents, hell!" Joe snapped. "That was the sales tax!" He glared; then a smile lifted his mouth. "You remember those yokels on Mars' Flatlands, and the way they worshipped gold?" " Goldbricks! " Harvey said succinctly. Grinning, Joe set the robot-controls for Mars.

What is the significance of Genius?

3

The character of Genius acts as a symbol of the things that visitors do not understand about Planetoid 42, and how Johnson uses this to his advantage when he tries to make money off of visitors. When humans first encounter him, Genius seems like an incredible and one-of-a-kind creature who fascinates the visitors, sometimes prompting them to want to take him to zoo. Johnson uses this to his advantage to set a trap, and allows visitors to buy Genius off of him before they realize that Genius can’t actually leave the planetoid. Not only does he look interesting, but he is also very talented and uses his six hands to accomplish many tasks at once. He is able to carry boxes while cleaning, and makes for an incredible waiter as he is able to play instruments while serving food. Johnson has to rely on the idea that the visitors will not think about Genius’ inability to adapt to other planets’ environments, and focus only on his uniqueness. Genius also represents how Johnson leaves out small pieces of information in strategic places. For instance, there is no reason to assume that Genius is able to speak based on the majority of the story, but once he arrived at Joe and Harvey’s ship he explains to them that he cannot go with them. It seems he is a piece of Johnson’s plot, as his assistant, as opposed to being more of an independent character who makes his own decisions, but there is not enough information to say for sure.

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Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net GRIFTERS' ASTEROID By H. L. GOLD Harvey and Joe were the slickest con-men ever to gyp a space-lane sucker. Or so they thought! Angus Johnson knew differently. He charged them five buckos for a glass of water—and got it! [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories May 1943. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Characteristically, Harvey Ellsworth tried to maintain his dignity, though his parched tongue was almost hanging out. But Joe Mallon, with no dignity to maintain, lurched across the rubbish-strewn patch of land that had been termed a spaceport. When Harvey staggered pontifically into the battered metalloy saloon—the only one on Planetoid 42—his tall, gangling partner was already stumbling out, mouthing something incoherent. They met in the doorway, violently. "We're delirious!" Joe cried. "It's a mirage!" "What is?" asked Harvey through a mouthful of cotton. Joe reeled aside, and Harvey saw what had upset his partner. He stared, speechless for once. In their hectic voyages from planet to planet, the pair of panacea purveyors had encountered the usual strange life-forms. But never had they seen anything like the amazing creature in that colonial saloon. Paying no attention to them, it was carrying a case of liquor in two hands, six siphons in two others, and a broom and dustpan in the remaining pair. The bartender, a big man resembling the plumpish Harvey in build, was leaning negligently on the counter, ordering this impossible being to fill the partly-emptied bottles, squeeze fruit juice and sweep the floor, all of which the native did simultaneously. "Nonsense," Harvey croaked uncertainly. "We have seen enough queer things to know there are always more." He led the way inside. Through thirst-cracked lips he rasped: "Water—quick!" Without a word, the bartender reached under the counter, brought out two glasses of water. The interplanetary con-men drank noisily, asked for more, until they had drunk eight glasses. Meanwhile, the bartender had taken out eight jiggers and filled them with whiskey. Harvey and Joe were breathing hard from having gulped the water so fast, but they were beginning to revive. They noticed the bartender's impersonal eyes studying them shrewdly. "Strangers, eh?" he asked at last. "Solar salesmen, my colonial friend," Harvey answered in his usual lush manner. "We purvey that renowned Martian remedy, La-anago Yergis , the formula for which was recently discovered by ourselves in the ancient ruined city of La-anago. Medical science is unanimous in proclaiming this magic medicine the sole panacea in the entire history of therapeutics." "Yeah?" said the bartender disinterestedly, polishing the chaser glasses without washing them. "Where you heading?" "Out of Mars for Ganymede. Our condenser broke down, and we've gone without water for five ghastly days." "Got a mechanic around this dumping ground you call a port?" Joe asked. "We did. He came near starving and moved on to Titan. Ships don't land here unless they're in trouble." "Then where's the water lead-in? We'll fill up and push off." "Mayor takes care of that," replied the saloon owner. "If you gents're finished at the bar, your drinks'll be forty buckos." Harvey grinned puzzledly. "We didn't take any whiskey." "Might as well. Water's five buckos a glass. Liquor's free with every chaser." Harvey's eyes bulged. Joe gulped. "That—that's robbery!" the lanky man managed to get out in a thin quaver. The barkeeper shrugged. "When there ain't many customers, you gotta make more on each one. Besides—" "Besides nothing!" Joe roared, finding his voice again. "You dirty crook—robbing poor spacemen! You—" "You dirty crook!" Joe roared. "Robbing honest spacemen!" Harvey nudged him warningly. "Easy, my boy, easy." He turned to the bartender apologetically. "Don't mind my friend. His adrenal glands are sometimes overactive. You were going to say—?" The round face of the barkeeper had assumed an aggrieved expression. "Folks are always thinkin' the other feller's out to do 'em," he said, shaking his head. "Lemme explain about the water here. It's bitter as some kinds of sin before it's purified. Have to bring it in with buckets and make it sweet. That takes time and labor. Waddya think—I was chargin' feller critters for water just out of devilment? I charge because I gotta." "Friend," said Harvey, taking out a wallet and counting off eight five-bucko bills, "here is your money. What's fair is fair, and you have put a different complexion on what seemed at first to be an unconscionable interjection of a middleman between Nature and man's thirst." The saloon man removed his dirty apron and came around the bar. "If that's an apology, I accept it. Now the mayor'll discuss filling your tanks. That's me. I'm also justice of the peace, official recorder, fire chief...." "And chief of police, no doubt," said Harvey jocosely. "Nope. That's my son, Jed. Angus Johnson's my name. Folks here just call me Chief. I run this town, and run it right. How much water will you need?" Joe estimated quickly. "About seventy-five liters, if we go on half rations," he answered. He waited apprehensively. "Let's say ten buckos a liter," the mayor said. "On account of the quantity, I'm able to quote a bargain price. Shucks, boys, it hurts me more to charge for water than it does for you to pay. I just got to, that's all." The mayor gestured to the native, who shuffled out to the tanks with them. The planetoid man worked the pump while the mayor intently watched the crude level-gauge, crying "Stop!" when it registered the proper amount. Then Johnson rubbed his thumb on his index finger and wetted his lips expectantly. Harvey bravely counted off the bills. He asked: "But what are we to do about replenishing our battery fluid? Ten buckos a liter would be preposterous. We simply can't afford it." Johnson's response almost floored them. "Who said anything about charging you for battery water? You can have all you want for nothing. It's just the purified stuff that comes so high." After giving them directions that would take them to the free-water pool, the ponderous factotum of Planetoid 42 shook hands and headed back to the saloon. His six-armed assistant followed him inside. "Now do you see, my hot-tempered colleague?" said Harvey as he and Joe picked up buckets that hung on the tank. "Johnson, as I saw instantly, is the victim of a difficult environment, and must charge accordingly." "Just the same," Joe griped, "paying for water isn't something you can get used to in ten minutes." In the fragile forest, they soon came across a stream that sprang from the igneous soil and splashed into the small pond whose contents, according to the mayor, was theirs for the asking. They filled their buckets and hauled them to the ship, then returned for more. It was on the sixth trip that Joe caught a glimpse of Jupiter-shine on a bright surface off to the left. The figure, 750, with the bucko sign in front of it, was still doing acrobatics inside his skull and keeping a faint suspicion alive in him. So he called Harvey and they went to investigate. Among the skimpy ground-crawling vines, they saw a long slender mound that was unmistakably a buried pipe. "What's this doing here?" Harvey asked, puzzled. "I thought Johnson had to transport water in pails." "Wonder where it leads to," Joe said uneasily. "It leads to the saloon," said Harvey, his eyes rapidly tracing the pipe back toward the spaceport. "What I am concerned with is where it leads from ." Five minutes later, panting heavily from the unaccustomed exertion of scrambling through the tangle of planetorial undergrowth, they burst into the open—before a clear, sparkling pool. Mutely, Harvey pointed out a pipe-end jutting under the water. "I am growing suspicious," he said in a rigidly controlled voice. But Joe was already on his knees, scooping up a handful of water and tasting it. "Sweet!" he snarled. They rushed back to the first pool, where Joe again tasted a sample. His mouth went wry. "Bitter! He uses only one pool, the sweet one! The only thing that needs purifying around here is that blasted mayor's conscience." "The asteroidal Poobah has tricked us with a slick come-on," said Harvey slowly. His eyes grew cold. "Joseph, the good-natured artist in me has become a hard and merciless avenger. I shall not rest until we have had the best of this colonial con-man! Watch your cues from this point hence." Fists clenched, the two returned to the saloon. But at the door they stopped and their fists unclenched. "Thought you gents were leaving," the mayor called out, seeing them frozen in the doorway. "Glad you didn't. Now you can meet my son, Jed. Him and me are the whole Earthman population of Johnson City." "You don't need any more," said Harvey, dismayed. Johnson's eight-foot son, topped by a massive roof of sun-bleached hair and held up by a foundation that seemed immovable, had obviously been born and raised in low gravity. For any decent-sized world would have kept him down near the general dimensions of a man. He held out an acre of palm. Harvey studied it worriedly, put his own hand somewhere on it, swallowed as it closed, then breathed again when his fingers were released in five units instead of a single compressed one. "Pleased to meet you," piped a voice that had never known a dense atmosphere. The pursuit of vengeance, Harvey realized, had taken a quick and unpleasant turn. Something shrewd was called for.... "Joseph!" he exclaimed, looking at his partner in alarm. "Don't you feel well?" Even before the others could turn to him, Joe's practiced eyes were gently crossing. He sagged against the door frame, all his features drooping like a bloodhound's. "Bring him in here!" Johnson cried. "I mean, get him away! He's coming down with asteroid fever!" "Of course," replied Harvey calmly. "Any fool knows the first symptoms of the disease that once scourged the universe." "What do you mean, once ?" demanded Johnson. "I come down with it every year, and I ain't hankering to have it in an off-season. Get him out of here!" "In good time. He can't be moved immediately." "Then he'll be here for months!" Harvey helped Joe to the counter and lifted him up on it. The mayor and his gigantic offspring were cowering across the room, trying to breathe in tiny, uncontaminating gasps. "You'll find everything you want in the back room," Johnson said frantically, "sulfopyridine, mustard plasters, rubs, inhalers, suction cups—" "Relics of the past," Harvey stated. "One medication is all modern man requires to combat the dread menace, asteroid fever." "What's that?" asked the mayor without conviction. Instead of replying, Harvey hurried outside to the ungainly second-hand rocket ship in the center of the shabby spaceport. He returned within a few minutes, carrying a bottle. Joe was still stretched out on the bar, panting, his eyes slowly crossing and uncrossing. Harvey lifted the patient's head tenderly, put the bottle to his lips and tilted it until he was forced to drink. When Joe tried to pull away, Harvey was inexorable. He made his partner drink until most of the liquid was gone. Then he stepped back and waited for the inevitable result. Joe's performance was better than ever. He lay supine for several moments, his face twisted into an expression that seemed doomed to perpetual wryness. Slowly, however, he sat up and his features straightened out. "Are—are you all right?" asked the mayor anxiously. "Much better," said Joe in a weak voice. "Maybe you need another dose," Harvey suggested. Joe recoiled. "I'm fine now!" he cried, and sprang off the bar to prove it. Astonished, Johnson and his son drew closer. They searched Joe's face, and then the mayor timidly felt his pulse. "Well, I'll be hanged!" Johnson ejaculated. " La-anago Yergis never fails, my friend," Harvey explained. "By actual test, it conquers asteroid fever in from four to twenty-three minutes, depending on the severity of the attack. Luckily, we caught this one before it grew formidable." The mayor's eyes became clouded mirrors of an inward conflict. "If you don't charge too much," he said warily, "I might think of buying some." "We do not sell this unbelievable remedy," Harvey replied with dignity. "It sells itself." "'Course, I'd expect a considerable reduction if I bought a whole case," said Johnson. "That would be the smallest investment you could make, compared with the vast loss of time and strength the fever involves." "How much?" asked the mayor unhappily. "For you, since you have taken us in so hospitably, a mere five hundred buckos." Johnson did not actually stagger back, but he gave the impression of doing so. "F-four hundred," he offered. "Not a red cent less than four seventy-five," Harvey said flatly. "Make it four fifty," quavered Johnson. "I dislike haggling," said Harvey. The final price, however, was four hundred and sixty-nine buckos and fifty redsents. Magnanimously, Harvey added: "And we will include, gratis , an elegant bottle-opener, a superb product of Mercurian handicraftsmanship." Johnson stabbed out a warning finger. "No tricks now. I want a taste of that stuff. You're not switching some worthless junk on me." Harvey took a glass from the bar and poured him a generous sample. The mayor sniffed it, grimaced, then threw it down his gullet. The ensuing minute saw a grim battle between a man and his stomach, a battle which the man gradually won. "There ain't no words for that taste," he gulped when it was safe to talk again. "Medicine," Harvey propounded, "should taste like medicine." To Joe he said: "Come, my esteemed colleague. We must perform the sacred task to which we have dedicated ourselves." With Joe stumbling along behind, he left the saloon, crossed the clearing and entered the ship. As soon as they were inside, Joe dropped his murderous silence and cried: "What kind of a dirty trick was that, giving me poison instead of that snake oil?" "That was not poison," Harvey contradicted quietly. "It was La-anago Yergis extract, plus." "Plus what—arsenic?" "Now, Joseph! Consider my quandary when I came back here to manufacture our specific for all known ailments, with the intention of selling yonder asteroidal tin-horn a bill of medical goods—an entire case, mind you. Was I to mix the extract with the water for which we had been swindled to the tune of ten buckos a liter? Where would our profit have been, then? No; I had to use the bitter free water, of course." "But why use it on me?" Joe demanded furiously. Harvey looked reprovingly at his gangling partner. "Did Johnson ask to taste it, or did he not? One must look ahead, Joseph. I had to produce the same medicine that we will now manufacture. Thus, you were a guinea pig for a splendid cause." "Okay, okay," Joe said. "But you shoulda charged him more." "Joseph, I promise you that we shall get back every redsent of which that swindler cheated us, besides whatever other funds or valuables he possesses. We could not be content with less." "Well, we're starting all right," admitted Joe. "How about that thing with six arms? He looks like a valuable. Can't we grab him off?" Harvey stopped filling bottles and looked up pensively. "I have every hope of luring away the profitable monstrosity. Apparently you have also surmised the fortune we could make with him. At first I purpose to exhibit him on our interplanetary tours with our streamlined panacea; he would be a spectacular attraction for bucolic suckers. Later, a brief period of demonstrating his abilities on the audio-visiphone. Then our triumph—we shall sell him at a stupendous figure to the zoo!" Joe was still dazed by that monetary vista when he and Harvey carried the case of medicine to the saloon. The mayor had already cleared a place of honor in the cluttered back room, where he told them to put it down carefully. Then he took the elaborate bottle-opener Harvey gave him, reverently uncorked a bottle and sampled it. It must have been at least as good as the first; he gagged. "That's the stuff, all right," he said, swallowing hard. He counted out the money into Harvey's hand, at a moderate rate that precariously balanced between his pleasure at getting the fever remedy and his pain at paying for it. Then he glanced out to see the position of Jupiter, and asked: "You gents eaten yet? The restaurant's open now." Harvey and Joe looked at each other. They hadn't been thinking about food at all, but suddenly they realized that they were hungry. "It's only water we were short of," Harvey said apprehensively. "We've got rations back at the ship." " H-mph! " the mayor grunted. "Powdered concentrates. Compressed pap. Suit yourselves. We treat our stomachs better here. And you're welcome to our hospitality." "Your hospitality," said Harvey, "depends on the prices you charge." "Well, if that's what's worrying you, you can stop worrying," answered the mayor promptly. "What's more, the kind of dinner I serve here you can't get anywhere else for any price." Swiftly, Harvey conned the possibilities of being bilked again. He saw none. "Let's take a look at the menu, anyhow, Joe," he said guardedly. Johnson immediately fell into the role of "mine host." "Come right in, gents," he invited. "Right into the dining room." He seated them at a table, which a rope tied between posts made more or less private, though nobody else was in the saloon and there was little chance of company. Genius, the six-armed native, appeared from the dingy kitchen with two menus in one hand, two glasses of water in another, plus napkins, silverware, a pitcher, plates, saucers, cups, and their cocktails, which were on the house. Then he stood by for orders. Harvey and Joe studied the menu critically. The prices were phenomenally low. When they glanced up at Johnson in perplexity, he grinned, bowed and asked: "Everything satisfactory, gents?" "Quite," said Harvey. "We shall order." For an hour they were served amazing dishes, both fresh and canned, the culinary wealth of this planetoid and all the system. And the service was as extraordinary as the meal itself. With four hands, Genius played deftly upon a pair of mellow Venusian viotars , using his other two hands for waiting on the table. "We absolutely must purchase this incredible specimen," Harvey whispered excitedly when Johnson and the native were both in the kitchen, attending to the next course. "He would make any society hostess's season a riotous success, which should be worth a great sum to women like Mrs. van Schuyler-Morgan, merely for his hire." "Think of a fast one fast," Joe agreed. "You're right." "But I dislike having to revise my opinion of a man so often," complained Harvey. "I wish Johnson would stay either swindler or honest merchant. This dinner is worth as least twenty buckos, yet I estimate our check at a mere bucko twenty redsents." The mayor's appearance prevented them from continuing the discussion. "It's been a great honor, gents," he said. "Ain't often I have visitors, and I like the best, like you two gents." As if on cue, Genius came out and put the check down between Joe and Harvey. Harvey picked it up negligently, but his casual air vanished in a yelp of horror. "What the devil is this?" he shouted.—"How do you arrive at this fantastic, idiotic figure— three hundred and twenty-eight buckos !" Johnson didn't answer. Neither did Genius; he simply put on the table, not a fingerbowl, but a magnifying glass. With one of his thirty fingers he pointed politely to the bottom of the menu. Harvey focused on the microscopic print, and his face went pasty with rage. The minute note read: "Services and entertainment, 327 buckos 80 redsents." "You can go to hell!" Joe growled. "We won't pay it!" Johnson sighed ponderously. "I was afraid you'd act like that," he said with regret. He pulled a tin badge out of his rear pocket, pinned it on his vest, and twisted his holstered gun into view. "Afraid I'll have to ask the sheriff to take over." Johnson, the "sheriff," collected the money, and Johnson, the "restaurateur," pocketed it. Meanwhile, Harvey tipped Joe the sign to remain calm. "My friend," he said to the mayor, and his tones took on a schoolmasterish severity, "your long absence from Earth has perhaps made you forget those elements of human wisdom that have entered the folk-lore of your native planet. Such as, for example: 'It is folly to kill a goose that lays golden eggs,' and 'Penny wise is pound foolish.'" "I don't get the connection," objected Johnson. "Well, by obliging us to pay such a high price for your dinner, you put out of your reach the chance of profiting from a really substantial deal. My partner and I were prepared to make you a sizable offer for the peculiar creature you call Genius. But by reducing our funds the way you have—" "Who said I wanted to sell him?" the mayor interrupted. He rubbed his fingers together and asked disinterestedly: "What were you going to offer, anyhow?" "It doesn't matter any longer," Harvey said with elaborate carelessness. "Perhaps you wouldn't have accepted it, anyway." "That's right," Johnson came back emphatically. "But what would your offer have been which I would have turned down?" "Which one? The one we were going to make, or the one we can make now?" "Either one. It don't make no difference. Genius is too valuable to sell." "Oh, come now, Mr. Johnson. Don't tell me no amount of money would tempt you!" "Nope. But how much did you say?" "Ah, then you will consider releasing Genius!" "Well, I'll tell you something," said the mayor confidentially. "When you've got one thing, you've got one thing. But when you've got money, it's the same as having a lot of things. Because, if you've got money, you can buy this and that and this and that and—" "This and that," concluded Joe. "We'll give you five hundred buckos." "Now, gents!" Johnson remonstrated. "Why, six hundred would hardly—" "You haven't left us much money," Harvey put in. The mayor frowned. "All right, we'll split the difference. Make it five-fifty." Harvey was quick to pay out, for this was a genuine windfall. Then he stood up and admired the astonishing possession he had so inexpensively acquired. "I really hate to deprive you of this unique creature," he said to Johnson. "I should imagine you will be rather lonely, with only your filial mammoth to keep you company." "I sure will," Johnson confessed glumly. "I got pretty attached to Genius, and I'm going to miss him something awful." Harvey forcibly removed his eyes from the native, who was clearing off the table almost all at once. "My friend," he said, "we take your only solace, it is true, but in his place we can offer something no less amazing and instructive." The mayor's hand went protectively to his pocket. "What is it?" he asked with the suspicion of a man who has seen human nature at its worst and expects nothing better. "Joseph, get our most prized belonging from the communications room of the ship," Harvey instructed. To Johnson he explained: "You must see the wondrous instrument before its value can be appreciated. My partner will soon have it here for your astonishment." Joe's face grew as glum as Johnson's had been. "Aw, Harv," he protested, "do we have to sell it? And right when I thought we were getting the key!" "We must not be selfish, my boy," Harvey said nobly. "We have had our chance; now we must relinquish Fate to the hands of a man who might have more success than we. Go, Joseph. Bring it here." Unwillingly, Joe turned and shuffled out. On a larger and heavier world than Planetoid 42, Johnson's curiosity would probably have had weight and mass. He was bursting with questions, but he was obviously afraid they would cost him money. For his part, Harvey allowed that curiosity to grow like a Venusian amoeba until Joe came in, lugging a radio. "Is that what you were talking about?" the mayor snorted. "What makes you think I want a radio? I came here to get away from singers and political speech-makers." "Do not jump to hasty conclusions," Harvey cautioned. "Another word, and I shall refuse you the greatest opportunity any man has ever had, with the sole exceptions of Joseph, myself and the unfortunate inventor of this absolutely awe-inspiring device." "I ain't in the market for a radio," Johnson said stubbornly. Harvey nodded in relief. "We have attempted to repay our host, Joseph. He has spurned our generosity. We have now the chance to continue our study, which I am positive will soon reward us with the key to an enormous fortune." "Well, that's no plating off our bow," Joe grunted. "I'm glad he did turn it down. I hated to give it up after working on it for three whole years." He picked up the radio and began walking toward the door. "Now, hold on!" the mayor cried. "I ain't saying I'll buy, but what is it I'm turning down?" Joe returned and set the instrument down on the bar. His face sorrowful, Harvey fondly stroked the scarred plasticoid cabinet. "To make a long story, Mr. Johnson," he said, "Joseph and I were among the chosen few who knew the famous Doctor Dean intimately. Just before his tragic death, you will recall, Dean allegedly went insane." He banged his fist on the bar. "I have said it before, and I repeat again, that was a malicious lie, spread by the doctor's enemies to discredit his greatest invention—this fourth dimensional radio!" "This what?" Johnson blurted out. "In simple terms," clarified Harvey, "the ingenious doctor discovered that the yawning chasm between the dimensions could be bridged by energy of all quanta. There has never been any question that the inhabitants of the super-dimension would be far more civilized than ourselves. Consequently, the man who could tap their knowledge would find himself in possession of a powerful, undreamt-of science!" The mayor looked respectfully at the silent box on the bar. "And this thing gets broadcasts from the fourth dimension?" "It does, Mr. Johnson! Only charlatans like those who envied Doctor Dean's magnificent accomplishments could deny that fact." The mayor put his hands in his pockets, unswiveled one hip and stared thoughtfully at the battered cabinet. "Well, let's say it picks up fourth dimensional broadcasts," he conceded. "But how could you understand what they're saying? Folks up there wouldn't talk our language." Again Harvey smashed his fist down. "Do you dare to repeat the scurvy lie that broke Dean's spirit and drove him to suicide?" Johnson recoiled. "No—no, of course not . I mean, being up here, I naturally couldn't get all the details." "Naturally," Harvey agreed, mollified. "I'm sorry I lost my temper. But it is a matter of record that the doctor proved the broadcasts emanating from the super-dimension were in English! Why should that be so difficult to believe? Is it impossible that at one time there was communication between the dimensions, that the super-beings admired our language and adopted it in all its beauty, adding to it their own hyper-scientific trimmings?" "Why, I don't know," Johnson said in confusion. "For three years, Joseph and I lost sleep and hair, trying to detect the simple key that would translate the somewhat metamorphosed broadcasts into our primitive English. It eluded us. Even the doctor failed. But that was understandable; a sensitive soul like his could stand only so much. And the combination of ridicule and failure to solve the mystery caused him to take his own life." Johnson winced. "Is that what you want to unload on me?" "For a very good reason, sir. Patience is the virtue that will be rewarded with the key to these fourth dimensional broadcasts. A man who could devote his life to improving this lonely worldlet is obviously a person with unusual patience." "Yeah," the mayor said grudgingly, "I ain't exactly flighty." "Therefore, you are the man who could unravel the problem!" Johnson asked skeptically: "How about a sample first?" Harvey turned a knob on the face of the scarred radio. After several squeals of spatial figures, a smooth voice began: "There are omnious pleajes of moby-hailegs in sonmirand which, howgraismon, are notch to be donfured miss ellasellabell in either or both hagasanipaj, by all means. This does not refly, on the brother man, nat or mizzafil saces are denuded by this ossifaligo...." Harvey switched off the set determinedly. "Wait a minute!" Johnson begged. "I almost got it then!" "I dislike being commercial," said Harvey, "but this astounding device still belongs to us. Would we not be foolish to let you discover the clue before purchasing the right to do so?" The mayor nodded indecisively, looking at the radio with agonized longing. "How much do you want?" he asked unhappily. "One thousand buckos, and no haggling. I am not in the mood." Johnson opened his mouth to argue; then, seeing Harvey's set features, paid with the worst possible grace. "Don't you think we ought to tell him about the batteries, Harv?" Joe asked. "What about the batteries?" demanded Johnson with deadly calm. "A very small matter," Harvey said airily. "You see, we have been analyzing these broadcasts for three years. In that time, of course, the batteries are bound to weaken. I estimate these should last not less than one Terrestrial month, at the very least." "What do I do then?" Harvey shrugged. "Special batteries are required, which I see Joseph has by chance brought along. For the batteries, the only ones of their kind left in the system, I ask only what they cost—one hundred and ninety-nine buckos, no more and, on the other hand, no less." Johnson was breathing hard, and his hand hovered dangerously near his gun. But he paid the amount Harvey wanted. Moreover, he actually shook hands when the two panacea purveyors collected their six-armed prize and said goodbye. Before they were outside, however, he had turned on the radio and was listening tensely to a woman's highly cultured, though rather angry voice, saying: "Oh, you hannaforge are all beasa-taga-sanimort. If you rue amount it, how do you respench a pure woman to ansver go-samak—" "I'll get it!" they heard Johnson mutter. Then the sound of giant feet crossing the barroom floor reached their ears, and a shrill question: "What's that, Papa?" "A fortune, Jed! Those fakers are damned fools, selling us a thing like—" Joe gazed at Harvey admiringly. "Another one sold? Harv, that spiel pulls them in like an ether storm!" Together with the remarkable planetoid man, they reached the ship. Above them, dark, tumbling shapes blotted out the stars and silently moved on. Joe opened the gangway door. "Come on in, pal," he said to Genius. "We're shoving off." The planetoid man grinned foolishly. "Can't go arong with you," he said with an apologetic manner. "I rike to, but pressure fratten me out if I go." "What in solar blazes are you talking about?" Harvey asked. "I grow up on pranetoid," Genius explained. "On big pranet, too much pressure for me." The two salesmen looked narrowly at each other. "Did Johnson know that when he sold you?" Joe snarled. "Oh, sure." The silly grin became wider than ever. "Peopre from Earth buy me rots of times. I never reave pranetoid, though." "Joseph," Harvey said ominously, "that slick colonist has put one over upon us. What is our customary procedure in that event?" "We tear him apart," Joe replied between his teeth. "Not Mister Johnson," advised Genius. "Have gun and badge. He shoot you first and then rock you up in prison." Harvey paused, his ominous air vanishing. "True. There is also the fact, Joseph, that when he discovers the scrambled rectifier in the radio we sold him, he will have been paid back in full for his regrettable dishonesty." Unwillingly, Joe agreed. While Genius retreated to a safe distance, they entered the ship and blasted off. Within a few minutes the automatic steering pilot had maneuvered them above the plane of the asteroid belt. "I got kind of dizzy," Joe said, "there were so many deals back and forth. How much did we make on the sucker?" "A goodly amount, I wager," Harvey responded. He took out a pencil and paper. "Medicine, 469.50; radio, 1,000; batteries, 199. Total—let's see—1668 buckos and 50 redsents. A goodly sum, as I told you." He emptied his pockets of money, spread it out on the astrogation table and began counting. Finished, he looked up, troubled. "How much did we have when we landed, Joseph?" "Exactly 1668 buckos," Joe answered promptly. "I can't understand it," said Harvey. "Instead of double our capital, we now have only 1668 buckos and 50 redsents!" Feverishly, he returned to his pencil and paper. "Drinking water, 790; battery water, free; meal, 328; planetoid man, 550. Total: 1668 buckos!" He stared at the figures. "We paid out almost as much as we took in," he said bitterly. "Despite our intensive efforts, we made the absurd sum of fifty redsents." "Why, the dirty crook!" Joe growled. But after a few moments of sad reflection, Harvey became philosophical. "Perhaps, Joseph, we are more fortunate than we realize. We were, after all, completely in Johnson's power. The more I ponder, the more I believe we were lucky to escape. And, anyhow, we did make fifty redsents on the swindler. A moral victory, my boy." Joe, who had been sunk desparingly into a chair, now stood up slowly and asked: "Remember that bottle-opener we gave him?" "Certainly," Harvey explained. "What about it?" "How much did it cost us?" Harvey's eyebrows puckered. Suddenly he started laughing. "You're right, Joseph. We paid forty-six redsents for it on Venus. So, after all that transacting of business, we made four redsents!" "Four redsents, hell!" Joe snapped. "That was the sales tax!" He glared; then a smile lifted his mouth. "You remember those yokels on Mars' Flatlands, and the way they worshipped gold?" " Goldbricks! " Harvey said succinctly. Grinning, Joe set the robot-controls for Mars.

How does Johnson demonstrate that he's a formidable opponent to Joe and Harvey?

1

Joe and Harvey are professional conmen, so they are quite good at swindling innocent victims. They make their money by peddling a fake panacea called La-anago Yergis. The men regularly partake in an act where Joe falls ill and Harvey has to come to his rescue with the extract. Although Johnson falls for this trick and purchases an entire case of the medicine, he also does a great job of getting Harvey and Joe back. At the end of the story, the opposing sides come out basically even in terms of financial gains. Johnson first demonstrates that he can take advantage of Harvey and Joe when he gives them each eight glasses of water before letting them know that he charges a lot for each glass. The men say they’re thirsty, so he is happy to give them as much as they’d like to drink. Although Johnson says that the water costs so much because it must be specially purified, the truth is that he has access to an entire body of water and there really isn’t any reason to charge so much. Later, Johnson convinces Harvey and Joe that they’re hungry enough to sit down at his restaurant even though neither one had even mentioned food. He allows them to order their food and believe that they’re getting an incredible deal until he tells them about the fine print on the menu. Harvey and Joe are forced to fork over hundreds of dollars for their meal, and when they threaten to walk out, Johnson reminds them that he is the sheriff on Planetoid 42, and he has the power to arrest them.

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Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net GRIFTERS' ASTEROID By H. L. GOLD Harvey and Joe were the slickest con-men ever to gyp a space-lane sucker. Or so they thought! Angus Johnson knew differently. He charged them five buckos for a glass of water—and got it! [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories May 1943. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Characteristically, Harvey Ellsworth tried to maintain his dignity, though his parched tongue was almost hanging out. But Joe Mallon, with no dignity to maintain, lurched across the rubbish-strewn patch of land that had been termed a spaceport. When Harvey staggered pontifically into the battered metalloy saloon—the only one on Planetoid 42—his tall, gangling partner was already stumbling out, mouthing something incoherent. They met in the doorway, violently. "We're delirious!" Joe cried. "It's a mirage!" "What is?" asked Harvey through a mouthful of cotton. Joe reeled aside, and Harvey saw what had upset his partner. He stared, speechless for once. In their hectic voyages from planet to planet, the pair of panacea purveyors had encountered the usual strange life-forms. But never had they seen anything like the amazing creature in that colonial saloon. Paying no attention to them, it was carrying a case of liquor in two hands, six siphons in two others, and a broom and dustpan in the remaining pair. The bartender, a big man resembling the plumpish Harvey in build, was leaning negligently on the counter, ordering this impossible being to fill the partly-emptied bottles, squeeze fruit juice and sweep the floor, all of which the native did simultaneously. "Nonsense," Harvey croaked uncertainly. "We have seen enough queer things to know there are always more." He led the way inside. Through thirst-cracked lips he rasped: "Water—quick!" Without a word, the bartender reached under the counter, brought out two glasses of water. The interplanetary con-men drank noisily, asked for more, until they had drunk eight glasses. Meanwhile, the bartender had taken out eight jiggers and filled them with whiskey. Harvey and Joe were breathing hard from having gulped the water so fast, but they were beginning to revive. They noticed the bartender's impersonal eyes studying them shrewdly. "Strangers, eh?" he asked at last. "Solar salesmen, my colonial friend," Harvey answered in his usual lush manner. "We purvey that renowned Martian remedy, La-anago Yergis , the formula for which was recently discovered by ourselves in the ancient ruined city of La-anago. Medical science is unanimous in proclaiming this magic medicine the sole panacea in the entire history of therapeutics." "Yeah?" said the bartender disinterestedly, polishing the chaser glasses without washing them. "Where you heading?" "Out of Mars for Ganymede. Our condenser broke down, and we've gone without water for five ghastly days." "Got a mechanic around this dumping ground you call a port?" Joe asked. "We did. He came near starving and moved on to Titan. Ships don't land here unless they're in trouble." "Then where's the water lead-in? We'll fill up and push off." "Mayor takes care of that," replied the saloon owner. "If you gents're finished at the bar, your drinks'll be forty buckos." Harvey grinned puzzledly. "We didn't take any whiskey." "Might as well. Water's five buckos a glass. Liquor's free with every chaser." Harvey's eyes bulged. Joe gulped. "That—that's robbery!" the lanky man managed to get out in a thin quaver. The barkeeper shrugged. "When there ain't many customers, you gotta make more on each one. Besides—" "Besides nothing!" Joe roared, finding his voice again. "You dirty crook—robbing poor spacemen! You—" "You dirty crook!" Joe roared. "Robbing honest spacemen!" Harvey nudged him warningly. "Easy, my boy, easy." He turned to the bartender apologetically. "Don't mind my friend. His adrenal glands are sometimes overactive. You were going to say—?" The round face of the barkeeper had assumed an aggrieved expression. "Folks are always thinkin' the other feller's out to do 'em," he said, shaking his head. "Lemme explain about the water here. It's bitter as some kinds of sin before it's purified. Have to bring it in with buckets and make it sweet. That takes time and labor. Waddya think—I was chargin' feller critters for water just out of devilment? I charge because I gotta." "Friend," said Harvey, taking out a wallet and counting off eight five-bucko bills, "here is your money. What's fair is fair, and you have put a different complexion on what seemed at first to be an unconscionable interjection of a middleman between Nature and man's thirst." The saloon man removed his dirty apron and came around the bar. "If that's an apology, I accept it. Now the mayor'll discuss filling your tanks. That's me. I'm also justice of the peace, official recorder, fire chief...." "And chief of police, no doubt," said Harvey jocosely. "Nope. That's my son, Jed. Angus Johnson's my name. Folks here just call me Chief. I run this town, and run it right. How much water will you need?" Joe estimated quickly. "About seventy-five liters, if we go on half rations," he answered. He waited apprehensively. "Let's say ten buckos a liter," the mayor said. "On account of the quantity, I'm able to quote a bargain price. Shucks, boys, it hurts me more to charge for water than it does for you to pay. I just got to, that's all." The mayor gestured to the native, who shuffled out to the tanks with them. The planetoid man worked the pump while the mayor intently watched the crude level-gauge, crying "Stop!" when it registered the proper amount. Then Johnson rubbed his thumb on his index finger and wetted his lips expectantly. Harvey bravely counted off the bills. He asked: "But what are we to do about replenishing our battery fluid? Ten buckos a liter would be preposterous. We simply can't afford it." Johnson's response almost floored them. "Who said anything about charging you for battery water? You can have all you want for nothing. It's just the purified stuff that comes so high." After giving them directions that would take them to the free-water pool, the ponderous factotum of Planetoid 42 shook hands and headed back to the saloon. His six-armed assistant followed him inside. "Now do you see, my hot-tempered colleague?" said Harvey as he and Joe picked up buckets that hung on the tank. "Johnson, as I saw instantly, is the victim of a difficult environment, and must charge accordingly." "Just the same," Joe griped, "paying for water isn't something you can get used to in ten minutes." In the fragile forest, they soon came across a stream that sprang from the igneous soil and splashed into the small pond whose contents, according to the mayor, was theirs for the asking. They filled their buckets and hauled them to the ship, then returned for more. It was on the sixth trip that Joe caught a glimpse of Jupiter-shine on a bright surface off to the left. The figure, 750, with the bucko sign in front of it, was still doing acrobatics inside his skull and keeping a faint suspicion alive in him. So he called Harvey and they went to investigate. Among the skimpy ground-crawling vines, they saw a long slender mound that was unmistakably a buried pipe. "What's this doing here?" Harvey asked, puzzled. "I thought Johnson had to transport water in pails." "Wonder where it leads to," Joe said uneasily. "It leads to the saloon," said Harvey, his eyes rapidly tracing the pipe back toward the spaceport. "What I am concerned with is where it leads from ." Five minutes later, panting heavily from the unaccustomed exertion of scrambling through the tangle of planetorial undergrowth, they burst into the open—before a clear, sparkling pool. Mutely, Harvey pointed out a pipe-end jutting under the water. "I am growing suspicious," he said in a rigidly controlled voice. But Joe was already on his knees, scooping up a handful of water and tasting it. "Sweet!" he snarled. They rushed back to the first pool, where Joe again tasted a sample. His mouth went wry. "Bitter! He uses only one pool, the sweet one! The only thing that needs purifying around here is that blasted mayor's conscience." "The asteroidal Poobah has tricked us with a slick come-on," said Harvey slowly. His eyes grew cold. "Joseph, the good-natured artist in me has become a hard and merciless avenger. I shall not rest until we have had the best of this colonial con-man! Watch your cues from this point hence." Fists clenched, the two returned to the saloon. But at the door they stopped and their fists unclenched. "Thought you gents were leaving," the mayor called out, seeing them frozen in the doorway. "Glad you didn't. Now you can meet my son, Jed. Him and me are the whole Earthman population of Johnson City." "You don't need any more," said Harvey, dismayed. Johnson's eight-foot son, topped by a massive roof of sun-bleached hair and held up by a foundation that seemed immovable, had obviously been born and raised in low gravity. For any decent-sized world would have kept him down near the general dimensions of a man. He held out an acre of palm. Harvey studied it worriedly, put his own hand somewhere on it, swallowed as it closed, then breathed again when his fingers were released in five units instead of a single compressed one. "Pleased to meet you," piped a voice that had never known a dense atmosphere. The pursuit of vengeance, Harvey realized, had taken a quick and unpleasant turn. Something shrewd was called for.... "Joseph!" he exclaimed, looking at his partner in alarm. "Don't you feel well?" Even before the others could turn to him, Joe's practiced eyes were gently crossing. He sagged against the door frame, all his features drooping like a bloodhound's. "Bring him in here!" Johnson cried. "I mean, get him away! He's coming down with asteroid fever!" "Of course," replied Harvey calmly. "Any fool knows the first symptoms of the disease that once scourged the universe." "What do you mean, once ?" demanded Johnson. "I come down with it every year, and I ain't hankering to have it in an off-season. Get him out of here!" "In good time. He can't be moved immediately." "Then he'll be here for months!" Harvey helped Joe to the counter and lifted him up on it. The mayor and his gigantic offspring were cowering across the room, trying to breathe in tiny, uncontaminating gasps. "You'll find everything you want in the back room," Johnson said frantically, "sulfopyridine, mustard plasters, rubs, inhalers, suction cups—" "Relics of the past," Harvey stated. "One medication is all modern man requires to combat the dread menace, asteroid fever." "What's that?" asked the mayor without conviction. Instead of replying, Harvey hurried outside to the ungainly second-hand rocket ship in the center of the shabby spaceport. He returned within a few minutes, carrying a bottle. Joe was still stretched out on the bar, panting, his eyes slowly crossing and uncrossing. Harvey lifted the patient's head tenderly, put the bottle to his lips and tilted it until he was forced to drink. When Joe tried to pull away, Harvey was inexorable. He made his partner drink until most of the liquid was gone. Then he stepped back and waited for the inevitable result. Joe's performance was better than ever. He lay supine for several moments, his face twisted into an expression that seemed doomed to perpetual wryness. Slowly, however, he sat up and his features straightened out. "Are—are you all right?" asked the mayor anxiously. "Much better," said Joe in a weak voice. "Maybe you need another dose," Harvey suggested. Joe recoiled. "I'm fine now!" he cried, and sprang off the bar to prove it. Astonished, Johnson and his son drew closer. They searched Joe's face, and then the mayor timidly felt his pulse. "Well, I'll be hanged!" Johnson ejaculated. " La-anago Yergis never fails, my friend," Harvey explained. "By actual test, it conquers asteroid fever in from four to twenty-three minutes, depending on the severity of the attack. Luckily, we caught this one before it grew formidable." The mayor's eyes became clouded mirrors of an inward conflict. "If you don't charge too much," he said warily, "I might think of buying some." "We do not sell this unbelievable remedy," Harvey replied with dignity. "It sells itself." "'Course, I'd expect a considerable reduction if I bought a whole case," said Johnson. "That would be the smallest investment you could make, compared with the vast loss of time and strength the fever involves." "How much?" asked the mayor unhappily. "For you, since you have taken us in so hospitably, a mere five hundred buckos." Johnson did not actually stagger back, but he gave the impression of doing so. "F-four hundred," he offered. "Not a red cent less than four seventy-five," Harvey said flatly. "Make it four fifty," quavered Johnson. "I dislike haggling," said Harvey. The final price, however, was four hundred and sixty-nine buckos and fifty redsents. Magnanimously, Harvey added: "And we will include, gratis , an elegant bottle-opener, a superb product of Mercurian handicraftsmanship." Johnson stabbed out a warning finger. "No tricks now. I want a taste of that stuff. You're not switching some worthless junk on me." Harvey took a glass from the bar and poured him a generous sample. The mayor sniffed it, grimaced, then threw it down his gullet. The ensuing minute saw a grim battle between a man and his stomach, a battle which the man gradually won. "There ain't no words for that taste," he gulped when it was safe to talk again. "Medicine," Harvey propounded, "should taste like medicine." To Joe he said: "Come, my esteemed colleague. We must perform the sacred task to which we have dedicated ourselves." With Joe stumbling along behind, he left the saloon, crossed the clearing and entered the ship. As soon as they were inside, Joe dropped his murderous silence and cried: "What kind of a dirty trick was that, giving me poison instead of that snake oil?" "That was not poison," Harvey contradicted quietly. "It was La-anago Yergis extract, plus." "Plus what—arsenic?" "Now, Joseph! Consider my quandary when I came back here to manufacture our specific for all known ailments, with the intention of selling yonder asteroidal tin-horn a bill of medical goods—an entire case, mind you. Was I to mix the extract with the water for which we had been swindled to the tune of ten buckos a liter? Where would our profit have been, then? No; I had to use the bitter free water, of course." "But why use it on me?" Joe demanded furiously. Harvey looked reprovingly at his gangling partner. "Did Johnson ask to taste it, or did he not? One must look ahead, Joseph. I had to produce the same medicine that we will now manufacture. Thus, you were a guinea pig for a splendid cause." "Okay, okay," Joe said. "But you shoulda charged him more." "Joseph, I promise you that we shall get back every redsent of which that swindler cheated us, besides whatever other funds or valuables he possesses. We could not be content with less." "Well, we're starting all right," admitted Joe. "How about that thing with six arms? He looks like a valuable. Can't we grab him off?" Harvey stopped filling bottles and looked up pensively. "I have every hope of luring away the profitable monstrosity. Apparently you have also surmised the fortune we could make with him. At first I purpose to exhibit him on our interplanetary tours with our streamlined panacea; he would be a spectacular attraction for bucolic suckers. Later, a brief period of demonstrating his abilities on the audio-visiphone. Then our triumph—we shall sell him at a stupendous figure to the zoo!" Joe was still dazed by that monetary vista when he and Harvey carried the case of medicine to the saloon. The mayor had already cleared a place of honor in the cluttered back room, where he told them to put it down carefully. Then he took the elaborate bottle-opener Harvey gave him, reverently uncorked a bottle and sampled it. It must have been at least as good as the first; he gagged. "That's the stuff, all right," he said, swallowing hard. He counted out the money into Harvey's hand, at a moderate rate that precariously balanced between his pleasure at getting the fever remedy and his pain at paying for it. Then he glanced out to see the position of Jupiter, and asked: "You gents eaten yet? The restaurant's open now." Harvey and Joe looked at each other. They hadn't been thinking about food at all, but suddenly they realized that they were hungry. "It's only water we were short of," Harvey said apprehensively. "We've got rations back at the ship." " H-mph! " the mayor grunted. "Powdered concentrates. Compressed pap. Suit yourselves. We treat our stomachs better here. And you're welcome to our hospitality." "Your hospitality," said Harvey, "depends on the prices you charge." "Well, if that's what's worrying you, you can stop worrying," answered the mayor promptly. "What's more, the kind of dinner I serve here you can't get anywhere else for any price." Swiftly, Harvey conned the possibilities of being bilked again. He saw none. "Let's take a look at the menu, anyhow, Joe," he said guardedly. Johnson immediately fell into the role of "mine host." "Come right in, gents," he invited. "Right into the dining room." He seated them at a table, which a rope tied between posts made more or less private, though nobody else was in the saloon and there was little chance of company. Genius, the six-armed native, appeared from the dingy kitchen with two menus in one hand, two glasses of water in another, plus napkins, silverware, a pitcher, plates, saucers, cups, and their cocktails, which were on the house. Then he stood by for orders. Harvey and Joe studied the menu critically. The prices were phenomenally low. When they glanced up at Johnson in perplexity, he grinned, bowed and asked: "Everything satisfactory, gents?" "Quite," said Harvey. "We shall order." For an hour they were served amazing dishes, both fresh and canned, the culinary wealth of this planetoid and all the system. And the service was as extraordinary as the meal itself. With four hands, Genius played deftly upon a pair of mellow Venusian viotars , using his other two hands for waiting on the table. "We absolutely must purchase this incredible specimen," Harvey whispered excitedly when Johnson and the native were both in the kitchen, attending to the next course. "He would make any society hostess's season a riotous success, which should be worth a great sum to women like Mrs. van Schuyler-Morgan, merely for his hire." "Think of a fast one fast," Joe agreed. "You're right." "But I dislike having to revise my opinion of a man so often," complained Harvey. "I wish Johnson would stay either swindler or honest merchant. This dinner is worth as least twenty buckos, yet I estimate our check at a mere bucko twenty redsents." The mayor's appearance prevented them from continuing the discussion. "It's been a great honor, gents," he said. "Ain't often I have visitors, and I like the best, like you two gents." As if on cue, Genius came out and put the check down between Joe and Harvey. Harvey picked it up negligently, but his casual air vanished in a yelp of horror. "What the devil is this?" he shouted.—"How do you arrive at this fantastic, idiotic figure— three hundred and twenty-eight buckos !" Johnson didn't answer. Neither did Genius; he simply put on the table, not a fingerbowl, but a magnifying glass. With one of his thirty fingers he pointed politely to the bottom of the menu. Harvey focused on the microscopic print, and his face went pasty with rage. The minute note read: "Services and entertainment, 327 buckos 80 redsents." "You can go to hell!" Joe growled. "We won't pay it!" Johnson sighed ponderously. "I was afraid you'd act like that," he said with regret. He pulled a tin badge out of his rear pocket, pinned it on his vest, and twisted his holstered gun into view. "Afraid I'll have to ask the sheriff to take over." Johnson, the "sheriff," collected the money, and Johnson, the "restaurateur," pocketed it. Meanwhile, Harvey tipped Joe the sign to remain calm. "My friend," he said to the mayor, and his tones took on a schoolmasterish severity, "your long absence from Earth has perhaps made you forget those elements of human wisdom that have entered the folk-lore of your native planet. Such as, for example: 'It is folly to kill a goose that lays golden eggs,' and 'Penny wise is pound foolish.'" "I don't get the connection," objected Johnson. "Well, by obliging us to pay such a high price for your dinner, you put out of your reach the chance of profiting from a really substantial deal. My partner and I were prepared to make you a sizable offer for the peculiar creature you call Genius. But by reducing our funds the way you have—" "Who said I wanted to sell him?" the mayor interrupted. He rubbed his fingers together and asked disinterestedly: "What were you going to offer, anyhow?" "It doesn't matter any longer," Harvey said with elaborate carelessness. "Perhaps you wouldn't have accepted it, anyway." "That's right," Johnson came back emphatically. "But what would your offer have been which I would have turned down?" "Which one? The one we were going to make, or the one we can make now?" "Either one. It don't make no difference. Genius is too valuable to sell." "Oh, come now, Mr. Johnson. Don't tell me no amount of money would tempt you!" "Nope. But how much did you say?" "Ah, then you will consider releasing Genius!" "Well, I'll tell you something," said the mayor confidentially. "When you've got one thing, you've got one thing. But when you've got money, it's the same as having a lot of things. Because, if you've got money, you can buy this and that and this and that and—" "This and that," concluded Joe. "We'll give you five hundred buckos." "Now, gents!" Johnson remonstrated. "Why, six hundred would hardly—" "You haven't left us much money," Harvey put in. The mayor frowned. "All right, we'll split the difference. Make it five-fifty." Harvey was quick to pay out, for this was a genuine windfall. Then he stood up and admired the astonishing possession he had so inexpensively acquired. "I really hate to deprive you of this unique creature," he said to Johnson. "I should imagine you will be rather lonely, with only your filial mammoth to keep you company." "I sure will," Johnson confessed glumly. "I got pretty attached to Genius, and I'm going to miss him something awful." Harvey forcibly removed his eyes from the native, who was clearing off the table almost all at once. "My friend," he said, "we take your only solace, it is true, but in his place we can offer something no less amazing and instructive." The mayor's hand went protectively to his pocket. "What is it?" he asked with the suspicion of a man who has seen human nature at its worst and expects nothing better. "Joseph, get our most prized belonging from the communications room of the ship," Harvey instructed. To Johnson he explained: "You must see the wondrous instrument before its value can be appreciated. My partner will soon have it here for your astonishment." Joe's face grew as glum as Johnson's had been. "Aw, Harv," he protested, "do we have to sell it? And right when I thought we were getting the key!" "We must not be selfish, my boy," Harvey said nobly. "We have had our chance; now we must relinquish Fate to the hands of a man who might have more success than we. Go, Joseph. Bring it here." Unwillingly, Joe turned and shuffled out. On a larger and heavier world than Planetoid 42, Johnson's curiosity would probably have had weight and mass. He was bursting with questions, but he was obviously afraid they would cost him money. For his part, Harvey allowed that curiosity to grow like a Venusian amoeba until Joe came in, lugging a radio. "Is that what you were talking about?" the mayor snorted. "What makes you think I want a radio? I came here to get away from singers and political speech-makers." "Do not jump to hasty conclusions," Harvey cautioned. "Another word, and I shall refuse you the greatest opportunity any man has ever had, with the sole exceptions of Joseph, myself and the unfortunate inventor of this absolutely awe-inspiring device." "I ain't in the market for a radio," Johnson said stubbornly. Harvey nodded in relief. "We have attempted to repay our host, Joseph. He has spurned our generosity. We have now the chance to continue our study, which I am positive will soon reward us with the key to an enormous fortune." "Well, that's no plating off our bow," Joe grunted. "I'm glad he did turn it down. I hated to give it up after working on it for three whole years." He picked up the radio and began walking toward the door. "Now, hold on!" the mayor cried. "I ain't saying I'll buy, but what is it I'm turning down?" Joe returned and set the instrument down on the bar. His face sorrowful, Harvey fondly stroked the scarred plasticoid cabinet. "To make a long story, Mr. Johnson," he said, "Joseph and I were among the chosen few who knew the famous Doctor Dean intimately. Just before his tragic death, you will recall, Dean allegedly went insane." He banged his fist on the bar. "I have said it before, and I repeat again, that was a malicious lie, spread by the doctor's enemies to discredit his greatest invention—this fourth dimensional radio!" "This what?" Johnson blurted out. "In simple terms," clarified Harvey, "the ingenious doctor discovered that the yawning chasm between the dimensions could be bridged by energy of all quanta. There has never been any question that the inhabitants of the super-dimension would be far more civilized than ourselves. Consequently, the man who could tap their knowledge would find himself in possession of a powerful, undreamt-of science!" The mayor looked respectfully at the silent box on the bar. "And this thing gets broadcasts from the fourth dimension?" "It does, Mr. Johnson! Only charlatans like those who envied Doctor Dean's magnificent accomplishments could deny that fact." The mayor put his hands in his pockets, unswiveled one hip and stared thoughtfully at the battered cabinet. "Well, let's say it picks up fourth dimensional broadcasts," he conceded. "But how could you understand what they're saying? Folks up there wouldn't talk our language." Again Harvey smashed his fist down. "Do you dare to repeat the scurvy lie that broke Dean's spirit and drove him to suicide?" Johnson recoiled. "No—no, of course not . I mean, being up here, I naturally couldn't get all the details." "Naturally," Harvey agreed, mollified. "I'm sorry I lost my temper. But it is a matter of record that the doctor proved the broadcasts emanating from the super-dimension were in English! Why should that be so difficult to believe? Is it impossible that at one time there was communication between the dimensions, that the super-beings admired our language and adopted it in all its beauty, adding to it their own hyper-scientific trimmings?" "Why, I don't know," Johnson said in confusion. "For three years, Joseph and I lost sleep and hair, trying to detect the simple key that would translate the somewhat metamorphosed broadcasts into our primitive English. It eluded us. Even the doctor failed. But that was understandable; a sensitive soul like his could stand only so much. And the combination of ridicule and failure to solve the mystery caused him to take his own life." Johnson winced. "Is that what you want to unload on me?" "For a very good reason, sir. Patience is the virtue that will be rewarded with the key to these fourth dimensional broadcasts. A man who could devote his life to improving this lonely worldlet is obviously a person with unusual patience." "Yeah," the mayor said grudgingly, "I ain't exactly flighty." "Therefore, you are the man who could unravel the problem!" Johnson asked skeptically: "How about a sample first?" Harvey turned a knob on the face of the scarred radio. After several squeals of spatial figures, a smooth voice began: "There are omnious pleajes of moby-hailegs in sonmirand which, howgraismon, are notch to be donfured miss ellasellabell in either or both hagasanipaj, by all means. This does not refly, on the brother man, nat or mizzafil saces are denuded by this ossifaligo...." Harvey switched off the set determinedly. "Wait a minute!" Johnson begged. "I almost got it then!" "I dislike being commercial," said Harvey, "but this astounding device still belongs to us. Would we not be foolish to let you discover the clue before purchasing the right to do so?" The mayor nodded indecisively, looking at the radio with agonized longing. "How much do you want?" he asked unhappily. "One thousand buckos, and no haggling. I am not in the mood." Johnson opened his mouth to argue; then, seeing Harvey's set features, paid with the worst possible grace. "Don't you think we ought to tell him about the batteries, Harv?" Joe asked. "What about the batteries?" demanded Johnson with deadly calm. "A very small matter," Harvey said airily. "You see, we have been analyzing these broadcasts for three years. In that time, of course, the batteries are bound to weaken. I estimate these should last not less than one Terrestrial month, at the very least." "What do I do then?" Harvey shrugged. "Special batteries are required, which I see Joseph has by chance brought along. For the batteries, the only ones of their kind left in the system, I ask only what they cost—one hundred and ninety-nine buckos, no more and, on the other hand, no less." Johnson was breathing hard, and his hand hovered dangerously near his gun. But he paid the amount Harvey wanted. Moreover, he actually shook hands when the two panacea purveyors collected their six-armed prize and said goodbye. Before they were outside, however, he had turned on the radio and was listening tensely to a woman's highly cultured, though rather angry voice, saying: "Oh, you hannaforge are all beasa-taga-sanimort. If you rue amount it, how do you respench a pure woman to ansver go-samak—" "I'll get it!" they heard Johnson mutter. Then the sound of giant feet crossing the barroom floor reached their ears, and a shrill question: "What's that, Papa?" "A fortune, Jed! Those fakers are damned fools, selling us a thing like—" Joe gazed at Harvey admiringly. "Another one sold? Harv, that spiel pulls them in like an ether storm!" Together with the remarkable planetoid man, they reached the ship. Above them, dark, tumbling shapes blotted out the stars and silently moved on. Joe opened the gangway door. "Come on in, pal," he said to Genius. "We're shoving off." The planetoid man grinned foolishly. "Can't go arong with you," he said with an apologetic manner. "I rike to, but pressure fratten me out if I go." "What in solar blazes are you talking about?" Harvey asked. "I grow up on pranetoid," Genius explained. "On big pranet, too much pressure for me." The two salesmen looked narrowly at each other. "Did Johnson know that when he sold you?" Joe snarled. "Oh, sure." The silly grin became wider than ever. "Peopre from Earth buy me rots of times. I never reave pranetoid, though." "Joseph," Harvey said ominously, "that slick colonist has put one over upon us. What is our customary procedure in that event?" "We tear him apart," Joe replied between his teeth. "Not Mister Johnson," advised Genius. "Have gun and badge. He shoot you first and then rock you up in prison." Harvey paused, his ominous air vanishing. "True. There is also the fact, Joseph, that when he discovers the scrambled rectifier in the radio we sold him, he will have been paid back in full for his regrettable dishonesty." Unwillingly, Joe agreed. While Genius retreated to a safe distance, they entered the ship and blasted off. Within a few minutes the automatic steering pilot had maneuvered them above the plane of the asteroid belt. "I got kind of dizzy," Joe said, "there were so many deals back and forth. How much did we make on the sucker?" "A goodly amount, I wager," Harvey responded. He took out a pencil and paper. "Medicine, 469.50; radio, 1,000; batteries, 199. Total—let's see—1668 buckos and 50 redsents. A goodly sum, as I told you." He emptied his pockets of money, spread it out on the astrogation table and began counting. Finished, he looked up, troubled. "How much did we have when we landed, Joseph?" "Exactly 1668 buckos," Joe answered promptly. "I can't understand it," said Harvey. "Instead of double our capital, we now have only 1668 buckos and 50 redsents!" Feverishly, he returned to his pencil and paper. "Drinking water, 790; battery water, free; meal, 328; planetoid man, 550. Total: 1668 buckos!" He stared at the figures. "We paid out almost as much as we took in," he said bitterly. "Despite our intensive efforts, we made the absurd sum of fifty redsents." "Why, the dirty crook!" Joe growled. But after a few moments of sad reflection, Harvey became philosophical. "Perhaps, Joseph, we are more fortunate than we realize. We were, after all, completely in Johnson's power. The more I ponder, the more I believe we were lucky to escape. And, anyhow, we did make fifty redsents on the swindler. A moral victory, my boy." Joe, who had been sunk desparingly into a chair, now stood up slowly and asked: "Remember that bottle-opener we gave him?" "Certainly," Harvey explained. "What about it?" "How much did it cost us?" Harvey's eyebrows puckered. Suddenly he started laughing. "You're right, Joseph. We paid forty-six redsents for it on Venus. So, after all that transacting of business, we made four redsents!" "Four redsents, hell!" Joe snapped. "That was the sales tax!" He glared; then a smile lifted his mouth. "You remember those yokels on Mars' Flatlands, and the way they worshipped gold?" " Goldbricks! " Harvey said succinctly. Grinning, Joe set the robot-controls for Mars.

How does Johnson demonstrate that he's a formidable opponent to Joe and Harvey?

5

Johnson has a number of schemes that he uses to swindle Harvey and Joe. He initially charges them for water that he claims is expensively purified when in fact it is naturally drinkable. He overcharges them for a meal using a menu with ludicrously fine print. Finally he sells them Genius even though they can't take him off world. In the end Johnson proves that he is just a good a grifter as Harvey and Joe because he manages to extract exactly as much money out of the pair as they do out of him.

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Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net GRIFTERS' ASTEROID By H. L. GOLD Harvey and Joe were the slickest con-men ever to gyp a space-lane sucker. Or so they thought! Angus Johnson knew differently. He charged them five buckos for a glass of water—and got it! [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories May 1943. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Characteristically, Harvey Ellsworth tried to maintain his dignity, though his parched tongue was almost hanging out. But Joe Mallon, with no dignity to maintain, lurched across the rubbish-strewn patch of land that had been termed a spaceport. When Harvey staggered pontifically into the battered metalloy saloon—the only one on Planetoid 42—his tall, gangling partner was already stumbling out, mouthing something incoherent. They met in the doorway, violently. "We're delirious!" Joe cried. "It's a mirage!" "What is?" asked Harvey through a mouthful of cotton. Joe reeled aside, and Harvey saw what had upset his partner. He stared, speechless for once. In their hectic voyages from planet to planet, the pair of panacea purveyors had encountered the usual strange life-forms. But never had they seen anything like the amazing creature in that colonial saloon. Paying no attention to them, it was carrying a case of liquor in two hands, six siphons in two others, and a broom and dustpan in the remaining pair. The bartender, a big man resembling the plumpish Harvey in build, was leaning negligently on the counter, ordering this impossible being to fill the partly-emptied bottles, squeeze fruit juice and sweep the floor, all of which the native did simultaneously. "Nonsense," Harvey croaked uncertainly. "We have seen enough queer things to know there are always more." He led the way inside. Through thirst-cracked lips he rasped: "Water—quick!" Without a word, the bartender reached under the counter, brought out two glasses of water. The interplanetary con-men drank noisily, asked for more, until they had drunk eight glasses. Meanwhile, the bartender had taken out eight jiggers and filled them with whiskey. Harvey and Joe were breathing hard from having gulped the water so fast, but they were beginning to revive. They noticed the bartender's impersonal eyes studying them shrewdly. "Strangers, eh?" he asked at last. "Solar salesmen, my colonial friend," Harvey answered in his usual lush manner. "We purvey that renowned Martian remedy, La-anago Yergis , the formula for which was recently discovered by ourselves in the ancient ruined city of La-anago. Medical science is unanimous in proclaiming this magic medicine the sole panacea in the entire history of therapeutics." "Yeah?" said the bartender disinterestedly, polishing the chaser glasses without washing them. "Where you heading?" "Out of Mars for Ganymede. Our condenser broke down, and we've gone without water for five ghastly days." "Got a mechanic around this dumping ground you call a port?" Joe asked. "We did. He came near starving and moved on to Titan. Ships don't land here unless they're in trouble." "Then where's the water lead-in? We'll fill up and push off." "Mayor takes care of that," replied the saloon owner. "If you gents're finished at the bar, your drinks'll be forty buckos." Harvey grinned puzzledly. "We didn't take any whiskey." "Might as well. Water's five buckos a glass. Liquor's free with every chaser." Harvey's eyes bulged. Joe gulped. "That—that's robbery!" the lanky man managed to get out in a thin quaver. The barkeeper shrugged. "When there ain't many customers, you gotta make more on each one. Besides—" "Besides nothing!" Joe roared, finding his voice again. "You dirty crook—robbing poor spacemen! You—" "You dirty crook!" Joe roared. "Robbing honest spacemen!" Harvey nudged him warningly. "Easy, my boy, easy." He turned to the bartender apologetically. "Don't mind my friend. His adrenal glands are sometimes overactive. You were going to say—?" The round face of the barkeeper had assumed an aggrieved expression. "Folks are always thinkin' the other feller's out to do 'em," he said, shaking his head. "Lemme explain about the water here. It's bitter as some kinds of sin before it's purified. Have to bring it in with buckets and make it sweet. That takes time and labor. Waddya think—I was chargin' feller critters for water just out of devilment? I charge because I gotta." "Friend," said Harvey, taking out a wallet and counting off eight five-bucko bills, "here is your money. What's fair is fair, and you have put a different complexion on what seemed at first to be an unconscionable interjection of a middleman between Nature and man's thirst." The saloon man removed his dirty apron and came around the bar. "If that's an apology, I accept it. Now the mayor'll discuss filling your tanks. That's me. I'm also justice of the peace, official recorder, fire chief...." "And chief of police, no doubt," said Harvey jocosely. "Nope. That's my son, Jed. Angus Johnson's my name. Folks here just call me Chief. I run this town, and run it right. How much water will you need?" Joe estimated quickly. "About seventy-five liters, if we go on half rations," he answered. He waited apprehensively. "Let's say ten buckos a liter," the mayor said. "On account of the quantity, I'm able to quote a bargain price. Shucks, boys, it hurts me more to charge for water than it does for you to pay. I just got to, that's all." The mayor gestured to the native, who shuffled out to the tanks with them. The planetoid man worked the pump while the mayor intently watched the crude level-gauge, crying "Stop!" when it registered the proper amount. Then Johnson rubbed his thumb on his index finger and wetted his lips expectantly. Harvey bravely counted off the bills. He asked: "But what are we to do about replenishing our battery fluid? Ten buckos a liter would be preposterous. We simply can't afford it." Johnson's response almost floored them. "Who said anything about charging you for battery water? You can have all you want for nothing. It's just the purified stuff that comes so high." After giving them directions that would take them to the free-water pool, the ponderous factotum of Planetoid 42 shook hands and headed back to the saloon. His six-armed assistant followed him inside. "Now do you see, my hot-tempered colleague?" said Harvey as he and Joe picked up buckets that hung on the tank. "Johnson, as I saw instantly, is the victim of a difficult environment, and must charge accordingly." "Just the same," Joe griped, "paying for water isn't something you can get used to in ten minutes." In the fragile forest, they soon came across a stream that sprang from the igneous soil and splashed into the small pond whose contents, according to the mayor, was theirs for the asking. They filled their buckets and hauled them to the ship, then returned for more. It was on the sixth trip that Joe caught a glimpse of Jupiter-shine on a bright surface off to the left. The figure, 750, with the bucko sign in front of it, was still doing acrobatics inside his skull and keeping a faint suspicion alive in him. So he called Harvey and they went to investigate. Among the skimpy ground-crawling vines, they saw a long slender mound that was unmistakably a buried pipe. "What's this doing here?" Harvey asked, puzzled. "I thought Johnson had to transport water in pails." "Wonder where it leads to," Joe said uneasily. "It leads to the saloon," said Harvey, his eyes rapidly tracing the pipe back toward the spaceport. "What I am concerned with is where it leads from ." Five minutes later, panting heavily from the unaccustomed exertion of scrambling through the tangle of planetorial undergrowth, they burst into the open—before a clear, sparkling pool. Mutely, Harvey pointed out a pipe-end jutting under the water. "I am growing suspicious," he said in a rigidly controlled voice. But Joe was already on his knees, scooping up a handful of water and tasting it. "Sweet!" he snarled. They rushed back to the first pool, where Joe again tasted a sample. His mouth went wry. "Bitter! He uses only one pool, the sweet one! The only thing that needs purifying around here is that blasted mayor's conscience." "The asteroidal Poobah has tricked us with a slick come-on," said Harvey slowly. His eyes grew cold. "Joseph, the good-natured artist in me has become a hard and merciless avenger. I shall not rest until we have had the best of this colonial con-man! Watch your cues from this point hence." Fists clenched, the two returned to the saloon. But at the door they stopped and their fists unclenched. "Thought you gents were leaving," the mayor called out, seeing them frozen in the doorway. "Glad you didn't. Now you can meet my son, Jed. Him and me are the whole Earthman population of Johnson City." "You don't need any more," said Harvey, dismayed. Johnson's eight-foot son, topped by a massive roof of sun-bleached hair and held up by a foundation that seemed immovable, had obviously been born and raised in low gravity. For any decent-sized world would have kept him down near the general dimensions of a man. He held out an acre of palm. Harvey studied it worriedly, put his own hand somewhere on it, swallowed as it closed, then breathed again when his fingers were released in five units instead of a single compressed one. "Pleased to meet you," piped a voice that had never known a dense atmosphere. The pursuit of vengeance, Harvey realized, had taken a quick and unpleasant turn. Something shrewd was called for.... "Joseph!" he exclaimed, looking at his partner in alarm. "Don't you feel well?" Even before the others could turn to him, Joe's practiced eyes were gently crossing. He sagged against the door frame, all his features drooping like a bloodhound's. "Bring him in here!" Johnson cried. "I mean, get him away! He's coming down with asteroid fever!" "Of course," replied Harvey calmly. "Any fool knows the first symptoms of the disease that once scourged the universe." "What do you mean, once ?" demanded Johnson. "I come down with it every year, and I ain't hankering to have it in an off-season. Get him out of here!" "In good time. He can't be moved immediately." "Then he'll be here for months!" Harvey helped Joe to the counter and lifted him up on it. The mayor and his gigantic offspring were cowering across the room, trying to breathe in tiny, uncontaminating gasps. "You'll find everything you want in the back room," Johnson said frantically, "sulfopyridine, mustard plasters, rubs, inhalers, suction cups—" "Relics of the past," Harvey stated. "One medication is all modern man requires to combat the dread menace, asteroid fever." "What's that?" asked the mayor without conviction. Instead of replying, Harvey hurried outside to the ungainly second-hand rocket ship in the center of the shabby spaceport. He returned within a few minutes, carrying a bottle. Joe was still stretched out on the bar, panting, his eyes slowly crossing and uncrossing. Harvey lifted the patient's head tenderly, put the bottle to his lips and tilted it until he was forced to drink. When Joe tried to pull away, Harvey was inexorable. He made his partner drink until most of the liquid was gone. Then he stepped back and waited for the inevitable result. Joe's performance was better than ever. He lay supine for several moments, his face twisted into an expression that seemed doomed to perpetual wryness. Slowly, however, he sat up and his features straightened out. "Are—are you all right?" asked the mayor anxiously. "Much better," said Joe in a weak voice. "Maybe you need another dose," Harvey suggested. Joe recoiled. "I'm fine now!" he cried, and sprang off the bar to prove it. Astonished, Johnson and his son drew closer. They searched Joe's face, and then the mayor timidly felt his pulse. "Well, I'll be hanged!" Johnson ejaculated. " La-anago Yergis never fails, my friend," Harvey explained. "By actual test, it conquers asteroid fever in from four to twenty-three minutes, depending on the severity of the attack. Luckily, we caught this one before it grew formidable." The mayor's eyes became clouded mirrors of an inward conflict. "If you don't charge too much," he said warily, "I might think of buying some." "We do not sell this unbelievable remedy," Harvey replied with dignity. "It sells itself." "'Course, I'd expect a considerable reduction if I bought a whole case," said Johnson. "That would be the smallest investment you could make, compared with the vast loss of time and strength the fever involves." "How much?" asked the mayor unhappily. "For you, since you have taken us in so hospitably, a mere five hundred buckos." Johnson did not actually stagger back, but he gave the impression of doing so. "F-four hundred," he offered. "Not a red cent less than four seventy-five," Harvey said flatly. "Make it four fifty," quavered Johnson. "I dislike haggling," said Harvey. The final price, however, was four hundred and sixty-nine buckos and fifty redsents. Magnanimously, Harvey added: "And we will include, gratis , an elegant bottle-opener, a superb product of Mercurian handicraftsmanship." Johnson stabbed out a warning finger. "No tricks now. I want a taste of that stuff. You're not switching some worthless junk on me." Harvey took a glass from the bar and poured him a generous sample. The mayor sniffed it, grimaced, then threw it down his gullet. The ensuing minute saw a grim battle between a man and his stomach, a battle which the man gradually won. "There ain't no words for that taste," he gulped when it was safe to talk again. "Medicine," Harvey propounded, "should taste like medicine." To Joe he said: "Come, my esteemed colleague. We must perform the sacred task to which we have dedicated ourselves." With Joe stumbling along behind, he left the saloon, crossed the clearing and entered the ship. As soon as they were inside, Joe dropped his murderous silence and cried: "What kind of a dirty trick was that, giving me poison instead of that snake oil?" "That was not poison," Harvey contradicted quietly. "It was La-anago Yergis extract, plus." "Plus what—arsenic?" "Now, Joseph! Consider my quandary when I came back here to manufacture our specific for all known ailments, with the intention of selling yonder asteroidal tin-horn a bill of medical goods—an entire case, mind you. Was I to mix the extract with the water for which we had been swindled to the tune of ten buckos a liter? Where would our profit have been, then? No; I had to use the bitter free water, of course." "But why use it on me?" Joe demanded furiously. Harvey looked reprovingly at his gangling partner. "Did Johnson ask to taste it, or did he not? One must look ahead, Joseph. I had to produce the same medicine that we will now manufacture. Thus, you were a guinea pig for a splendid cause." "Okay, okay," Joe said. "But you shoulda charged him more." "Joseph, I promise you that we shall get back every redsent of which that swindler cheated us, besides whatever other funds or valuables he possesses. We could not be content with less." "Well, we're starting all right," admitted Joe. "How about that thing with six arms? He looks like a valuable. Can't we grab him off?" Harvey stopped filling bottles and looked up pensively. "I have every hope of luring away the profitable monstrosity. Apparently you have also surmised the fortune we could make with him. At first I purpose to exhibit him on our interplanetary tours with our streamlined panacea; he would be a spectacular attraction for bucolic suckers. Later, a brief period of demonstrating his abilities on the audio-visiphone. Then our triumph—we shall sell him at a stupendous figure to the zoo!" Joe was still dazed by that monetary vista when he and Harvey carried the case of medicine to the saloon. The mayor had already cleared a place of honor in the cluttered back room, where he told them to put it down carefully. Then he took the elaborate bottle-opener Harvey gave him, reverently uncorked a bottle and sampled it. It must have been at least as good as the first; he gagged. "That's the stuff, all right," he said, swallowing hard. He counted out the money into Harvey's hand, at a moderate rate that precariously balanced between his pleasure at getting the fever remedy and his pain at paying for it. Then he glanced out to see the position of Jupiter, and asked: "You gents eaten yet? The restaurant's open now." Harvey and Joe looked at each other. They hadn't been thinking about food at all, but suddenly they realized that they were hungry. "It's only water we were short of," Harvey said apprehensively. "We've got rations back at the ship." " H-mph! " the mayor grunted. "Powdered concentrates. Compressed pap. Suit yourselves. We treat our stomachs better here. And you're welcome to our hospitality." "Your hospitality," said Harvey, "depends on the prices you charge." "Well, if that's what's worrying you, you can stop worrying," answered the mayor promptly. "What's more, the kind of dinner I serve here you can't get anywhere else for any price." Swiftly, Harvey conned the possibilities of being bilked again. He saw none. "Let's take a look at the menu, anyhow, Joe," he said guardedly. Johnson immediately fell into the role of "mine host." "Come right in, gents," he invited. "Right into the dining room." He seated them at a table, which a rope tied between posts made more or less private, though nobody else was in the saloon and there was little chance of company. Genius, the six-armed native, appeared from the dingy kitchen with two menus in one hand, two glasses of water in another, plus napkins, silverware, a pitcher, plates, saucers, cups, and their cocktails, which were on the house. Then he stood by for orders. Harvey and Joe studied the menu critically. The prices were phenomenally low. When they glanced up at Johnson in perplexity, he grinned, bowed and asked: "Everything satisfactory, gents?" "Quite," said Harvey. "We shall order." For an hour they were served amazing dishes, both fresh and canned, the culinary wealth of this planetoid and all the system. And the service was as extraordinary as the meal itself. With four hands, Genius played deftly upon a pair of mellow Venusian viotars , using his other two hands for waiting on the table. "We absolutely must purchase this incredible specimen," Harvey whispered excitedly when Johnson and the native were both in the kitchen, attending to the next course. "He would make any society hostess's season a riotous success, which should be worth a great sum to women like Mrs. van Schuyler-Morgan, merely for his hire." "Think of a fast one fast," Joe agreed. "You're right." "But I dislike having to revise my opinion of a man so often," complained Harvey. "I wish Johnson would stay either swindler or honest merchant. This dinner is worth as least twenty buckos, yet I estimate our check at a mere bucko twenty redsents." The mayor's appearance prevented them from continuing the discussion. "It's been a great honor, gents," he said. "Ain't often I have visitors, and I like the best, like you two gents." As if on cue, Genius came out and put the check down between Joe and Harvey. Harvey picked it up negligently, but his casual air vanished in a yelp of horror. "What the devil is this?" he shouted.—"How do you arrive at this fantastic, idiotic figure— three hundred and twenty-eight buckos !" Johnson didn't answer. Neither did Genius; he simply put on the table, not a fingerbowl, but a magnifying glass. With one of his thirty fingers he pointed politely to the bottom of the menu. Harvey focused on the microscopic print, and his face went pasty with rage. The minute note read: "Services and entertainment, 327 buckos 80 redsents." "You can go to hell!" Joe growled. "We won't pay it!" Johnson sighed ponderously. "I was afraid you'd act like that," he said with regret. He pulled a tin badge out of his rear pocket, pinned it on his vest, and twisted his holstered gun into view. "Afraid I'll have to ask the sheriff to take over." Johnson, the "sheriff," collected the money, and Johnson, the "restaurateur," pocketed it. Meanwhile, Harvey tipped Joe the sign to remain calm. "My friend," he said to the mayor, and his tones took on a schoolmasterish severity, "your long absence from Earth has perhaps made you forget those elements of human wisdom that have entered the folk-lore of your native planet. Such as, for example: 'It is folly to kill a goose that lays golden eggs,' and 'Penny wise is pound foolish.'" "I don't get the connection," objected Johnson. "Well, by obliging us to pay such a high price for your dinner, you put out of your reach the chance of profiting from a really substantial deal. My partner and I were prepared to make you a sizable offer for the peculiar creature you call Genius. But by reducing our funds the way you have—" "Who said I wanted to sell him?" the mayor interrupted. He rubbed his fingers together and asked disinterestedly: "What were you going to offer, anyhow?" "It doesn't matter any longer," Harvey said with elaborate carelessness. "Perhaps you wouldn't have accepted it, anyway." "That's right," Johnson came back emphatically. "But what would your offer have been which I would have turned down?" "Which one? The one we were going to make, or the one we can make now?" "Either one. It don't make no difference. Genius is too valuable to sell." "Oh, come now, Mr. Johnson. Don't tell me no amount of money would tempt you!" "Nope. But how much did you say?" "Ah, then you will consider releasing Genius!" "Well, I'll tell you something," said the mayor confidentially. "When you've got one thing, you've got one thing. But when you've got money, it's the same as having a lot of things. Because, if you've got money, you can buy this and that and this and that and—" "This and that," concluded Joe. "We'll give you five hundred buckos." "Now, gents!" Johnson remonstrated. "Why, six hundred would hardly—" "You haven't left us much money," Harvey put in. The mayor frowned. "All right, we'll split the difference. Make it five-fifty." Harvey was quick to pay out, for this was a genuine windfall. Then he stood up and admired the astonishing possession he had so inexpensively acquired. "I really hate to deprive you of this unique creature," he said to Johnson. "I should imagine you will be rather lonely, with only your filial mammoth to keep you company." "I sure will," Johnson confessed glumly. "I got pretty attached to Genius, and I'm going to miss him something awful." Harvey forcibly removed his eyes from the native, who was clearing off the table almost all at once. "My friend," he said, "we take your only solace, it is true, but in his place we can offer something no less amazing and instructive." The mayor's hand went protectively to his pocket. "What is it?" he asked with the suspicion of a man who has seen human nature at its worst and expects nothing better. "Joseph, get our most prized belonging from the communications room of the ship," Harvey instructed. To Johnson he explained: "You must see the wondrous instrument before its value can be appreciated. My partner will soon have it here for your astonishment." Joe's face grew as glum as Johnson's had been. "Aw, Harv," he protested, "do we have to sell it? And right when I thought we were getting the key!" "We must not be selfish, my boy," Harvey said nobly. "We have had our chance; now we must relinquish Fate to the hands of a man who might have more success than we. Go, Joseph. Bring it here." Unwillingly, Joe turned and shuffled out. On a larger and heavier world than Planetoid 42, Johnson's curiosity would probably have had weight and mass. He was bursting with questions, but he was obviously afraid they would cost him money. For his part, Harvey allowed that curiosity to grow like a Venusian amoeba until Joe came in, lugging a radio. "Is that what you were talking about?" the mayor snorted. "What makes you think I want a radio? I came here to get away from singers and political speech-makers." "Do not jump to hasty conclusions," Harvey cautioned. "Another word, and I shall refuse you the greatest opportunity any man has ever had, with the sole exceptions of Joseph, myself and the unfortunate inventor of this absolutely awe-inspiring device." "I ain't in the market for a radio," Johnson said stubbornly. Harvey nodded in relief. "We have attempted to repay our host, Joseph. He has spurned our generosity. We have now the chance to continue our study, which I am positive will soon reward us with the key to an enormous fortune." "Well, that's no plating off our bow," Joe grunted. "I'm glad he did turn it down. I hated to give it up after working on it for three whole years." He picked up the radio and began walking toward the door. "Now, hold on!" the mayor cried. "I ain't saying I'll buy, but what is it I'm turning down?" Joe returned and set the instrument down on the bar. His face sorrowful, Harvey fondly stroked the scarred plasticoid cabinet. "To make a long story, Mr. Johnson," he said, "Joseph and I were among the chosen few who knew the famous Doctor Dean intimately. Just before his tragic death, you will recall, Dean allegedly went insane." He banged his fist on the bar. "I have said it before, and I repeat again, that was a malicious lie, spread by the doctor's enemies to discredit his greatest invention—this fourth dimensional radio!" "This what?" Johnson blurted out. "In simple terms," clarified Harvey, "the ingenious doctor discovered that the yawning chasm between the dimensions could be bridged by energy of all quanta. There has never been any question that the inhabitants of the super-dimension would be far more civilized than ourselves. Consequently, the man who could tap their knowledge would find himself in possession of a powerful, undreamt-of science!" The mayor looked respectfully at the silent box on the bar. "And this thing gets broadcasts from the fourth dimension?" "It does, Mr. Johnson! Only charlatans like those who envied Doctor Dean's magnificent accomplishments could deny that fact." The mayor put his hands in his pockets, unswiveled one hip and stared thoughtfully at the battered cabinet. "Well, let's say it picks up fourth dimensional broadcasts," he conceded. "But how could you understand what they're saying? Folks up there wouldn't talk our language." Again Harvey smashed his fist down. "Do you dare to repeat the scurvy lie that broke Dean's spirit and drove him to suicide?" Johnson recoiled. "No—no, of course not . I mean, being up here, I naturally couldn't get all the details." "Naturally," Harvey agreed, mollified. "I'm sorry I lost my temper. But it is a matter of record that the doctor proved the broadcasts emanating from the super-dimension were in English! Why should that be so difficult to believe? Is it impossible that at one time there was communication between the dimensions, that the super-beings admired our language and adopted it in all its beauty, adding to it their own hyper-scientific trimmings?" "Why, I don't know," Johnson said in confusion. "For three years, Joseph and I lost sleep and hair, trying to detect the simple key that would translate the somewhat metamorphosed broadcasts into our primitive English. It eluded us. Even the doctor failed. But that was understandable; a sensitive soul like his could stand only so much. And the combination of ridicule and failure to solve the mystery caused him to take his own life." Johnson winced. "Is that what you want to unload on me?" "For a very good reason, sir. Patience is the virtue that will be rewarded with the key to these fourth dimensional broadcasts. A man who could devote his life to improving this lonely worldlet is obviously a person with unusual patience." "Yeah," the mayor said grudgingly, "I ain't exactly flighty." "Therefore, you are the man who could unravel the problem!" Johnson asked skeptically: "How about a sample first?" Harvey turned a knob on the face of the scarred radio. After several squeals of spatial figures, a smooth voice began: "There are omnious pleajes of moby-hailegs in sonmirand which, howgraismon, are notch to be donfured miss ellasellabell in either or both hagasanipaj, by all means. This does not refly, on the brother man, nat or mizzafil saces are denuded by this ossifaligo...." Harvey switched off the set determinedly. "Wait a minute!" Johnson begged. "I almost got it then!" "I dislike being commercial," said Harvey, "but this astounding device still belongs to us. Would we not be foolish to let you discover the clue before purchasing the right to do so?" The mayor nodded indecisively, looking at the radio with agonized longing. "How much do you want?" he asked unhappily. "One thousand buckos, and no haggling. I am not in the mood." Johnson opened his mouth to argue; then, seeing Harvey's set features, paid with the worst possible grace. "Don't you think we ought to tell him about the batteries, Harv?" Joe asked. "What about the batteries?" demanded Johnson with deadly calm. "A very small matter," Harvey said airily. "You see, we have been analyzing these broadcasts for three years. In that time, of course, the batteries are bound to weaken. I estimate these should last not less than one Terrestrial month, at the very least." "What do I do then?" Harvey shrugged. "Special batteries are required, which I see Joseph has by chance brought along. For the batteries, the only ones of their kind left in the system, I ask only what they cost—one hundred and ninety-nine buckos, no more and, on the other hand, no less." Johnson was breathing hard, and his hand hovered dangerously near his gun. But he paid the amount Harvey wanted. Moreover, he actually shook hands when the two panacea purveyors collected their six-armed prize and said goodbye. Before they were outside, however, he had turned on the radio and was listening tensely to a woman's highly cultured, though rather angry voice, saying: "Oh, you hannaforge are all beasa-taga-sanimort. If you rue amount it, how do you respench a pure woman to ansver go-samak—" "I'll get it!" they heard Johnson mutter. Then the sound of giant feet crossing the barroom floor reached their ears, and a shrill question: "What's that, Papa?" "A fortune, Jed! Those fakers are damned fools, selling us a thing like—" Joe gazed at Harvey admiringly. "Another one sold? Harv, that spiel pulls them in like an ether storm!" Together with the remarkable planetoid man, they reached the ship. Above them, dark, tumbling shapes blotted out the stars and silently moved on. Joe opened the gangway door. "Come on in, pal," he said to Genius. "We're shoving off." The planetoid man grinned foolishly. "Can't go arong with you," he said with an apologetic manner. "I rike to, but pressure fratten me out if I go." "What in solar blazes are you talking about?" Harvey asked. "I grow up on pranetoid," Genius explained. "On big pranet, too much pressure for me." The two salesmen looked narrowly at each other. "Did Johnson know that when he sold you?" Joe snarled. "Oh, sure." The silly grin became wider than ever. "Peopre from Earth buy me rots of times. I never reave pranetoid, though." "Joseph," Harvey said ominously, "that slick colonist has put one over upon us. What is our customary procedure in that event?" "We tear him apart," Joe replied between his teeth. "Not Mister Johnson," advised Genius. "Have gun and badge. He shoot you first and then rock you up in prison." Harvey paused, his ominous air vanishing. "True. There is also the fact, Joseph, that when he discovers the scrambled rectifier in the radio we sold him, he will have been paid back in full for his regrettable dishonesty." Unwillingly, Joe agreed. While Genius retreated to a safe distance, they entered the ship and blasted off. Within a few minutes the automatic steering pilot had maneuvered them above the plane of the asteroid belt. "I got kind of dizzy," Joe said, "there were so many deals back and forth. How much did we make on the sucker?" "A goodly amount, I wager," Harvey responded. He took out a pencil and paper. "Medicine, 469.50; radio, 1,000; batteries, 199. Total—let's see—1668 buckos and 50 redsents. A goodly sum, as I told you." He emptied his pockets of money, spread it out on the astrogation table and began counting. Finished, he looked up, troubled. "How much did we have when we landed, Joseph?" "Exactly 1668 buckos," Joe answered promptly. "I can't understand it," said Harvey. "Instead of double our capital, we now have only 1668 buckos and 50 redsents!" Feverishly, he returned to his pencil and paper. "Drinking water, 790; battery water, free; meal, 328; planetoid man, 550. Total: 1668 buckos!" He stared at the figures. "We paid out almost as much as we took in," he said bitterly. "Despite our intensive efforts, we made the absurd sum of fifty redsents." "Why, the dirty crook!" Joe growled. But after a few moments of sad reflection, Harvey became philosophical. "Perhaps, Joseph, we are more fortunate than we realize. We were, after all, completely in Johnson's power. The more I ponder, the more I believe we were lucky to escape. And, anyhow, we did make fifty redsents on the swindler. A moral victory, my boy." Joe, who had been sunk desparingly into a chair, now stood up slowly and asked: "Remember that bottle-opener we gave him?" "Certainly," Harvey explained. "What about it?" "How much did it cost us?" Harvey's eyebrows puckered. Suddenly he started laughing. "You're right, Joseph. We paid forty-six redsents for it on Venus. So, after all that transacting of business, we made four redsents!" "Four redsents, hell!" Joe snapped. "That was the sales tax!" He glared; then a smile lifted his mouth. "You remember those yokels on Mars' Flatlands, and the way they worshipped gold?" " Goldbricks! " Harvey said succinctly. Grinning, Joe set the robot-controls for Mars.

How does Johnson demonstrate that he's a formidable opponent to Joe and Harvey?

6

Joe and Harvey arrive on this planet in need of water for their ship and in the hopes that they will be able to make a profit off of it. From the get-go, we know that these men are scheming cons, but Johnson is the first to make a move. He cons them into paying more for the water than was necessary and from there the battle only grows. With every con Joe and Harvey pull, Johnson is right back with them. Although they may stump him in the end with the ingenious radio that picks up the fourth dimension, he got the last laugh what with Genius being unable to leave. As well, when Joe and Harvey count their money in the end, they realize they’re leaving with the same amount they arrived with. Johnson was not only a formidable foe but possibly their equal in terms of scheming qualities.

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Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net GRIFTERS' ASTEROID By H. L. GOLD Harvey and Joe were the slickest con-men ever to gyp a space-lane sucker. Or so they thought! Angus Johnson knew differently. He charged them five buckos for a glass of water—and got it! [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories May 1943. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Characteristically, Harvey Ellsworth tried to maintain his dignity, though his parched tongue was almost hanging out. But Joe Mallon, with no dignity to maintain, lurched across the rubbish-strewn patch of land that had been termed a spaceport. When Harvey staggered pontifically into the battered metalloy saloon—the only one on Planetoid 42—his tall, gangling partner was already stumbling out, mouthing something incoherent. They met in the doorway, violently. "We're delirious!" Joe cried. "It's a mirage!" "What is?" asked Harvey through a mouthful of cotton. Joe reeled aside, and Harvey saw what had upset his partner. He stared, speechless for once. In their hectic voyages from planet to planet, the pair of panacea purveyors had encountered the usual strange life-forms. But never had they seen anything like the amazing creature in that colonial saloon. Paying no attention to them, it was carrying a case of liquor in two hands, six siphons in two others, and a broom and dustpan in the remaining pair. The bartender, a big man resembling the plumpish Harvey in build, was leaning negligently on the counter, ordering this impossible being to fill the partly-emptied bottles, squeeze fruit juice and sweep the floor, all of which the native did simultaneously. "Nonsense," Harvey croaked uncertainly. "We have seen enough queer things to know there are always more." He led the way inside. Through thirst-cracked lips he rasped: "Water—quick!" Without a word, the bartender reached under the counter, brought out two glasses of water. The interplanetary con-men drank noisily, asked for more, until they had drunk eight glasses. Meanwhile, the bartender had taken out eight jiggers and filled them with whiskey. Harvey and Joe were breathing hard from having gulped the water so fast, but they were beginning to revive. They noticed the bartender's impersonal eyes studying them shrewdly. "Strangers, eh?" he asked at last. "Solar salesmen, my colonial friend," Harvey answered in his usual lush manner. "We purvey that renowned Martian remedy, La-anago Yergis , the formula for which was recently discovered by ourselves in the ancient ruined city of La-anago. Medical science is unanimous in proclaiming this magic medicine the sole panacea in the entire history of therapeutics." "Yeah?" said the bartender disinterestedly, polishing the chaser glasses without washing them. "Where you heading?" "Out of Mars for Ganymede. Our condenser broke down, and we've gone without water for five ghastly days." "Got a mechanic around this dumping ground you call a port?" Joe asked. "We did. He came near starving and moved on to Titan. Ships don't land here unless they're in trouble." "Then where's the water lead-in? We'll fill up and push off." "Mayor takes care of that," replied the saloon owner. "If you gents're finished at the bar, your drinks'll be forty buckos." Harvey grinned puzzledly. "We didn't take any whiskey." "Might as well. Water's five buckos a glass. Liquor's free with every chaser." Harvey's eyes bulged. Joe gulped. "That—that's robbery!" the lanky man managed to get out in a thin quaver. The barkeeper shrugged. "When there ain't many customers, you gotta make more on each one. Besides—" "Besides nothing!" Joe roared, finding his voice again. "You dirty crook—robbing poor spacemen! You—" "You dirty crook!" Joe roared. "Robbing honest spacemen!" Harvey nudged him warningly. "Easy, my boy, easy." He turned to the bartender apologetically. "Don't mind my friend. His adrenal glands are sometimes overactive. You were going to say—?" The round face of the barkeeper had assumed an aggrieved expression. "Folks are always thinkin' the other feller's out to do 'em," he said, shaking his head. "Lemme explain about the water here. It's bitter as some kinds of sin before it's purified. Have to bring it in with buckets and make it sweet. That takes time and labor. Waddya think—I was chargin' feller critters for water just out of devilment? I charge because I gotta." "Friend," said Harvey, taking out a wallet and counting off eight five-bucko bills, "here is your money. What's fair is fair, and you have put a different complexion on what seemed at first to be an unconscionable interjection of a middleman between Nature and man's thirst." The saloon man removed his dirty apron and came around the bar. "If that's an apology, I accept it. Now the mayor'll discuss filling your tanks. That's me. I'm also justice of the peace, official recorder, fire chief...." "And chief of police, no doubt," said Harvey jocosely. "Nope. That's my son, Jed. Angus Johnson's my name. Folks here just call me Chief. I run this town, and run it right. How much water will you need?" Joe estimated quickly. "About seventy-five liters, if we go on half rations," he answered. He waited apprehensively. "Let's say ten buckos a liter," the mayor said. "On account of the quantity, I'm able to quote a bargain price. Shucks, boys, it hurts me more to charge for water than it does for you to pay. I just got to, that's all." The mayor gestured to the native, who shuffled out to the tanks with them. The planetoid man worked the pump while the mayor intently watched the crude level-gauge, crying "Stop!" when it registered the proper amount. Then Johnson rubbed his thumb on his index finger and wetted his lips expectantly. Harvey bravely counted off the bills. He asked: "But what are we to do about replenishing our battery fluid? Ten buckos a liter would be preposterous. We simply can't afford it." Johnson's response almost floored them. "Who said anything about charging you for battery water? You can have all you want for nothing. It's just the purified stuff that comes so high." After giving them directions that would take them to the free-water pool, the ponderous factotum of Planetoid 42 shook hands and headed back to the saloon. His six-armed assistant followed him inside. "Now do you see, my hot-tempered colleague?" said Harvey as he and Joe picked up buckets that hung on the tank. "Johnson, as I saw instantly, is the victim of a difficult environment, and must charge accordingly." "Just the same," Joe griped, "paying for water isn't something you can get used to in ten minutes." In the fragile forest, they soon came across a stream that sprang from the igneous soil and splashed into the small pond whose contents, according to the mayor, was theirs for the asking. They filled their buckets and hauled them to the ship, then returned for more. It was on the sixth trip that Joe caught a glimpse of Jupiter-shine on a bright surface off to the left. The figure, 750, with the bucko sign in front of it, was still doing acrobatics inside his skull and keeping a faint suspicion alive in him. So he called Harvey and they went to investigate. Among the skimpy ground-crawling vines, they saw a long slender mound that was unmistakably a buried pipe. "What's this doing here?" Harvey asked, puzzled. "I thought Johnson had to transport water in pails." "Wonder where it leads to," Joe said uneasily. "It leads to the saloon," said Harvey, his eyes rapidly tracing the pipe back toward the spaceport. "What I am concerned with is where it leads from ." Five minutes later, panting heavily from the unaccustomed exertion of scrambling through the tangle of planetorial undergrowth, they burst into the open—before a clear, sparkling pool. Mutely, Harvey pointed out a pipe-end jutting under the water. "I am growing suspicious," he said in a rigidly controlled voice. But Joe was already on his knees, scooping up a handful of water and tasting it. "Sweet!" he snarled. They rushed back to the first pool, where Joe again tasted a sample. His mouth went wry. "Bitter! He uses only one pool, the sweet one! The only thing that needs purifying around here is that blasted mayor's conscience." "The asteroidal Poobah has tricked us with a slick come-on," said Harvey slowly. His eyes grew cold. "Joseph, the good-natured artist in me has become a hard and merciless avenger. I shall not rest until we have had the best of this colonial con-man! Watch your cues from this point hence." Fists clenched, the two returned to the saloon. But at the door they stopped and their fists unclenched. "Thought you gents were leaving," the mayor called out, seeing them frozen in the doorway. "Glad you didn't. Now you can meet my son, Jed. Him and me are the whole Earthman population of Johnson City." "You don't need any more," said Harvey, dismayed. Johnson's eight-foot son, topped by a massive roof of sun-bleached hair and held up by a foundation that seemed immovable, had obviously been born and raised in low gravity. For any decent-sized world would have kept him down near the general dimensions of a man. He held out an acre of palm. Harvey studied it worriedly, put his own hand somewhere on it, swallowed as it closed, then breathed again when his fingers were released in five units instead of a single compressed one. "Pleased to meet you," piped a voice that had never known a dense atmosphere. The pursuit of vengeance, Harvey realized, had taken a quick and unpleasant turn. Something shrewd was called for.... "Joseph!" he exclaimed, looking at his partner in alarm. "Don't you feel well?" Even before the others could turn to him, Joe's practiced eyes were gently crossing. He sagged against the door frame, all his features drooping like a bloodhound's. "Bring him in here!" Johnson cried. "I mean, get him away! He's coming down with asteroid fever!" "Of course," replied Harvey calmly. "Any fool knows the first symptoms of the disease that once scourged the universe." "What do you mean, once ?" demanded Johnson. "I come down with it every year, and I ain't hankering to have it in an off-season. Get him out of here!" "In good time. He can't be moved immediately." "Then he'll be here for months!" Harvey helped Joe to the counter and lifted him up on it. The mayor and his gigantic offspring were cowering across the room, trying to breathe in tiny, uncontaminating gasps. "You'll find everything you want in the back room," Johnson said frantically, "sulfopyridine, mustard plasters, rubs, inhalers, suction cups—" "Relics of the past," Harvey stated. "One medication is all modern man requires to combat the dread menace, asteroid fever." "What's that?" asked the mayor without conviction. Instead of replying, Harvey hurried outside to the ungainly second-hand rocket ship in the center of the shabby spaceport. He returned within a few minutes, carrying a bottle. Joe was still stretched out on the bar, panting, his eyes slowly crossing and uncrossing. Harvey lifted the patient's head tenderly, put the bottle to his lips and tilted it until he was forced to drink. When Joe tried to pull away, Harvey was inexorable. He made his partner drink until most of the liquid was gone. Then he stepped back and waited for the inevitable result. Joe's performance was better than ever. He lay supine for several moments, his face twisted into an expression that seemed doomed to perpetual wryness. Slowly, however, he sat up and his features straightened out. "Are—are you all right?" asked the mayor anxiously. "Much better," said Joe in a weak voice. "Maybe you need another dose," Harvey suggested. Joe recoiled. "I'm fine now!" he cried, and sprang off the bar to prove it. Astonished, Johnson and his son drew closer. They searched Joe's face, and then the mayor timidly felt his pulse. "Well, I'll be hanged!" Johnson ejaculated. " La-anago Yergis never fails, my friend," Harvey explained. "By actual test, it conquers asteroid fever in from four to twenty-three minutes, depending on the severity of the attack. Luckily, we caught this one before it grew formidable." The mayor's eyes became clouded mirrors of an inward conflict. "If you don't charge too much," he said warily, "I might think of buying some." "We do not sell this unbelievable remedy," Harvey replied with dignity. "It sells itself." "'Course, I'd expect a considerable reduction if I bought a whole case," said Johnson. "That would be the smallest investment you could make, compared with the vast loss of time and strength the fever involves." "How much?" asked the mayor unhappily. "For you, since you have taken us in so hospitably, a mere five hundred buckos." Johnson did not actually stagger back, but he gave the impression of doing so. "F-four hundred," he offered. "Not a red cent less than four seventy-five," Harvey said flatly. "Make it four fifty," quavered Johnson. "I dislike haggling," said Harvey. The final price, however, was four hundred and sixty-nine buckos and fifty redsents. Magnanimously, Harvey added: "And we will include, gratis , an elegant bottle-opener, a superb product of Mercurian handicraftsmanship." Johnson stabbed out a warning finger. "No tricks now. I want a taste of that stuff. You're not switching some worthless junk on me." Harvey took a glass from the bar and poured him a generous sample. The mayor sniffed it, grimaced, then threw it down his gullet. The ensuing minute saw a grim battle between a man and his stomach, a battle which the man gradually won. "There ain't no words for that taste," he gulped when it was safe to talk again. "Medicine," Harvey propounded, "should taste like medicine." To Joe he said: "Come, my esteemed colleague. We must perform the sacred task to which we have dedicated ourselves." With Joe stumbling along behind, he left the saloon, crossed the clearing and entered the ship. As soon as they were inside, Joe dropped his murderous silence and cried: "What kind of a dirty trick was that, giving me poison instead of that snake oil?" "That was not poison," Harvey contradicted quietly. "It was La-anago Yergis extract, plus." "Plus what—arsenic?" "Now, Joseph! Consider my quandary when I came back here to manufacture our specific for all known ailments, with the intention of selling yonder asteroidal tin-horn a bill of medical goods—an entire case, mind you. Was I to mix the extract with the water for which we had been swindled to the tune of ten buckos a liter? Where would our profit have been, then? No; I had to use the bitter free water, of course." "But why use it on me?" Joe demanded furiously. Harvey looked reprovingly at his gangling partner. "Did Johnson ask to taste it, or did he not? One must look ahead, Joseph. I had to produce the same medicine that we will now manufacture. Thus, you were a guinea pig for a splendid cause." "Okay, okay," Joe said. "But you shoulda charged him more." "Joseph, I promise you that we shall get back every redsent of which that swindler cheated us, besides whatever other funds or valuables he possesses. We could not be content with less." "Well, we're starting all right," admitted Joe. "How about that thing with six arms? He looks like a valuable. Can't we grab him off?" Harvey stopped filling bottles and looked up pensively. "I have every hope of luring away the profitable monstrosity. Apparently you have also surmised the fortune we could make with him. At first I purpose to exhibit him on our interplanetary tours with our streamlined panacea; he would be a spectacular attraction for bucolic suckers. Later, a brief period of demonstrating his abilities on the audio-visiphone. Then our triumph—we shall sell him at a stupendous figure to the zoo!" Joe was still dazed by that monetary vista when he and Harvey carried the case of medicine to the saloon. The mayor had already cleared a place of honor in the cluttered back room, where he told them to put it down carefully. Then he took the elaborate bottle-opener Harvey gave him, reverently uncorked a bottle and sampled it. It must have been at least as good as the first; he gagged. "That's the stuff, all right," he said, swallowing hard. He counted out the money into Harvey's hand, at a moderate rate that precariously balanced between his pleasure at getting the fever remedy and his pain at paying for it. Then he glanced out to see the position of Jupiter, and asked: "You gents eaten yet? The restaurant's open now." Harvey and Joe looked at each other. They hadn't been thinking about food at all, but suddenly they realized that they were hungry. "It's only water we were short of," Harvey said apprehensively. "We've got rations back at the ship." " H-mph! " the mayor grunted. "Powdered concentrates. Compressed pap. Suit yourselves. We treat our stomachs better here. And you're welcome to our hospitality." "Your hospitality," said Harvey, "depends on the prices you charge." "Well, if that's what's worrying you, you can stop worrying," answered the mayor promptly. "What's more, the kind of dinner I serve here you can't get anywhere else for any price." Swiftly, Harvey conned the possibilities of being bilked again. He saw none. "Let's take a look at the menu, anyhow, Joe," he said guardedly. Johnson immediately fell into the role of "mine host." "Come right in, gents," he invited. "Right into the dining room." He seated them at a table, which a rope tied between posts made more or less private, though nobody else was in the saloon and there was little chance of company. Genius, the six-armed native, appeared from the dingy kitchen with two menus in one hand, two glasses of water in another, plus napkins, silverware, a pitcher, plates, saucers, cups, and their cocktails, which were on the house. Then he stood by for orders. Harvey and Joe studied the menu critically. The prices were phenomenally low. When they glanced up at Johnson in perplexity, he grinned, bowed and asked: "Everything satisfactory, gents?" "Quite," said Harvey. "We shall order." For an hour they were served amazing dishes, both fresh and canned, the culinary wealth of this planetoid and all the system. And the service was as extraordinary as the meal itself. With four hands, Genius played deftly upon a pair of mellow Venusian viotars , using his other two hands for waiting on the table. "We absolutely must purchase this incredible specimen," Harvey whispered excitedly when Johnson and the native were both in the kitchen, attending to the next course. "He would make any society hostess's season a riotous success, which should be worth a great sum to women like Mrs. van Schuyler-Morgan, merely for his hire." "Think of a fast one fast," Joe agreed. "You're right." "But I dislike having to revise my opinion of a man so often," complained Harvey. "I wish Johnson would stay either swindler or honest merchant. This dinner is worth as least twenty buckos, yet I estimate our check at a mere bucko twenty redsents." The mayor's appearance prevented them from continuing the discussion. "It's been a great honor, gents," he said. "Ain't often I have visitors, and I like the best, like you two gents." As if on cue, Genius came out and put the check down between Joe and Harvey. Harvey picked it up negligently, but his casual air vanished in a yelp of horror. "What the devil is this?" he shouted.—"How do you arrive at this fantastic, idiotic figure— three hundred and twenty-eight buckos !" Johnson didn't answer. Neither did Genius; he simply put on the table, not a fingerbowl, but a magnifying glass. With one of his thirty fingers he pointed politely to the bottom of the menu. Harvey focused on the microscopic print, and his face went pasty with rage. The minute note read: "Services and entertainment, 327 buckos 80 redsents." "You can go to hell!" Joe growled. "We won't pay it!" Johnson sighed ponderously. "I was afraid you'd act like that," he said with regret. He pulled a tin badge out of his rear pocket, pinned it on his vest, and twisted his holstered gun into view. "Afraid I'll have to ask the sheriff to take over." Johnson, the "sheriff," collected the money, and Johnson, the "restaurateur," pocketed it. Meanwhile, Harvey tipped Joe the sign to remain calm. "My friend," he said to the mayor, and his tones took on a schoolmasterish severity, "your long absence from Earth has perhaps made you forget those elements of human wisdom that have entered the folk-lore of your native planet. Such as, for example: 'It is folly to kill a goose that lays golden eggs,' and 'Penny wise is pound foolish.'" "I don't get the connection," objected Johnson. "Well, by obliging us to pay such a high price for your dinner, you put out of your reach the chance of profiting from a really substantial deal. My partner and I were prepared to make you a sizable offer for the peculiar creature you call Genius. But by reducing our funds the way you have—" "Who said I wanted to sell him?" the mayor interrupted. He rubbed his fingers together and asked disinterestedly: "What were you going to offer, anyhow?" "It doesn't matter any longer," Harvey said with elaborate carelessness. "Perhaps you wouldn't have accepted it, anyway." "That's right," Johnson came back emphatically. "But what would your offer have been which I would have turned down?" "Which one? The one we were going to make, or the one we can make now?" "Either one. It don't make no difference. Genius is too valuable to sell." "Oh, come now, Mr. Johnson. Don't tell me no amount of money would tempt you!" "Nope. But how much did you say?" "Ah, then you will consider releasing Genius!" "Well, I'll tell you something," said the mayor confidentially. "When you've got one thing, you've got one thing. But when you've got money, it's the same as having a lot of things. Because, if you've got money, you can buy this and that and this and that and—" "This and that," concluded Joe. "We'll give you five hundred buckos." "Now, gents!" Johnson remonstrated. "Why, six hundred would hardly—" "You haven't left us much money," Harvey put in. The mayor frowned. "All right, we'll split the difference. Make it five-fifty." Harvey was quick to pay out, for this was a genuine windfall. Then he stood up and admired the astonishing possession he had so inexpensively acquired. "I really hate to deprive you of this unique creature," he said to Johnson. "I should imagine you will be rather lonely, with only your filial mammoth to keep you company." "I sure will," Johnson confessed glumly. "I got pretty attached to Genius, and I'm going to miss him something awful." Harvey forcibly removed his eyes from the native, who was clearing off the table almost all at once. "My friend," he said, "we take your only solace, it is true, but in his place we can offer something no less amazing and instructive." The mayor's hand went protectively to his pocket. "What is it?" he asked with the suspicion of a man who has seen human nature at its worst and expects nothing better. "Joseph, get our most prized belonging from the communications room of the ship," Harvey instructed. To Johnson he explained: "You must see the wondrous instrument before its value can be appreciated. My partner will soon have it here for your astonishment." Joe's face grew as glum as Johnson's had been. "Aw, Harv," he protested, "do we have to sell it? And right when I thought we were getting the key!" "We must not be selfish, my boy," Harvey said nobly. "We have had our chance; now we must relinquish Fate to the hands of a man who might have more success than we. Go, Joseph. Bring it here." Unwillingly, Joe turned and shuffled out. On a larger and heavier world than Planetoid 42, Johnson's curiosity would probably have had weight and mass. He was bursting with questions, but he was obviously afraid they would cost him money. For his part, Harvey allowed that curiosity to grow like a Venusian amoeba until Joe came in, lugging a radio. "Is that what you were talking about?" the mayor snorted. "What makes you think I want a radio? I came here to get away from singers and political speech-makers." "Do not jump to hasty conclusions," Harvey cautioned. "Another word, and I shall refuse you the greatest opportunity any man has ever had, with the sole exceptions of Joseph, myself and the unfortunate inventor of this absolutely awe-inspiring device." "I ain't in the market for a radio," Johnson said stubbornly. Harvey nodded in relief. "We have attempted to repay our host, Joseph. He has spurned our generosity. We have now the chance to continue our study, which I am positive will soon reward us with the key to an enormous fortune." "Well, that's no plating off our bow," Joe grunted. "I'm glad he did turn it down. I hated to give it up after working on it for three whole years." He picked up the radio and began walking toward the door. "Now, hold on!" the mayor cried. "I ain't saying I'll buy, but what is it I'm turning down?" Joe returned and set the instrument down on the bar. His face sorrowful, Harvey fondly stroked the scarred plasticoid cabinet. "To make a long story, Mr. Johnson," he said, "Joseph and I were among the chosen few who knew the famous Doctor Dean intimately. Just before his tragic death, you will recall, Dean allegedly went insane." He banged his fist on the bar. "I have said it before, and I repeat again, that was a malicious lie, spread by the doctor's enemies to discredit his greatest invention—this fourth dimensional radio!" "This what?" Johnson blurted out. "In simple terms," clarified Harvey, "the ingenious doctor discovered that the yawning chasm between the dimensions could be bridged by energy of all quanta. There has never been any question that the inhabitants of the super-dimension would be far more civilized than ourselves. Consequently, the man who could tap their knowledge would find himself in possession of a powerful, undreamt-of science!" The mayor looked respectfully at the silent box on the bar. "And this thing gets broadcasts from the fourth dimension?" "It does, Mr. Johnson! Only charlatans like those who envied Doctor Dean's magnificent accomplishments could deny that fact." The mayor put his hands in his pockets, unswiveled one hip and stared thoughtfully at the battered cabinet. "Well, let's say it picks up fourth dimensional broadcasts," he conceded. "But how could you understand what they're saying? Folks up there wouldn't talk our language." Again Harvey smashed his fist down. "Do you dare to repeat the scurvy lie that broke Dean's spirit and drove him to suicide?" Johnson recoiled. "No—no, of course not . I mean, being up here, I naturally couldn't get all the details." "Naturally," Harvey agreed, mollified. "I'm sorry I lost my temper. But it is a matter of record that the doctor proved the broadcasts emanating from the super-dimension were in English! Why should that be so difficult to believe? Is it impossible that at one time there was communication between the dimensions, that the super-beings admired our language and adopted it in all its beauty, adding to it their own hyper-scientific trimmings?" "Why, I don't know," Johnson said in confusion. "For three years, Joseph and I lost sleep and hair, trying to detect the simple key that would translate the somewhat metamorphosed broadcasts into our primitive English. It eluded us. Even the doctor failed. But that was understandable; a sensitive soul like his could stand only so much. And the combination of ridicule and failure to solve the mystery caused him to take his own life." Johnson winced. "Is that what you want to unload on me?" "For a very good reason, sir. Patience is the virtue that will be rewarded with the key to these fourth dimensional broadcasts. A man who could devote his life to improving this lonely worldlet is obviously a person with unusual patience." "Yeah," the mayor said grudgingly, "I ain't exactly flighty." "Therefore, you are the man who could unravel the problem!" Johnson asked skeptically: "How about a sample first?" Harvey turned a knob on the face of the scarred radio. After several squeals of spatial figures, a smooth voice began: "There are omnious pleajes of moby-hailegs in sonmirand which, howgraismon, are notch to be donfured miss ellasellabell in either or both hagasanipaj, by all means. This does not refly, on the brother man, nat or mizzafil saces are denuded by this ossifaligo...." Harvey switched off the set determinedly. "Wait a minute!" Johnson begged. "I almost got it then!" "I dislike being commercial," said Harvey, "but this astounding device still belongs to us. Would we not be foolish to let you discover the clue before purchasing the right to do so?" The mayor nodded indecisively, looking at the radio with agonized longing. "How much do you want?" he asked unhappily. "One thousand buckos, and no haggling. I am not in the mood." Johnson opened his mouth to argue; then, seeing Harvey's set features, paid with the worst possible grace. "Don't you think we ought to tell him about the batteries, Harv?" Joe asked. "What about the batteries?" demanded Johnson with deadly calm. "A very small matter," Harvey said airily. "You see, we have been analyzing these broadcasts for three years. In that time, of course, the batteries are bound to weaken. I estimate these should last not less than one Terrestrial month, at the very least." "What do I do then?" Harvey shrugged. "Special batteries are required, which I see Joseph has by chance brought along. For the batteries, the only ones of their kind left in the system, I ask only what they cost—one hundred and ninety-nine buckos, no more and, on the other hand, no less." Johnson was breathing hard, and his hand hovered dangerously near his gun. But he paid the amount Harvey wanted. Moreover, he actually shook hands when the two panacea purveyors collected their six-armed prize and said goodbye. Before they were outside, however, he had turned on the radio and was listening tensely to a woman's highly cultured, though rather angry voice, saying: "Oh, you hannaforge are all beasa-taga-sanimort. If you rue amount it, how do you respench a pure woman to ansver go-samak—" "I'll get it!" they heard Johnson mutter. Then the sound of giant feet crossing the barroom floor reached their ears, and a shrill question: "What's that, Papa?" "A fortune, Jed! Those fakers are damned fools, selling us a thing like—" Joe gazed at Harvey admiringly. "Another one sold? Harv, that spiel pulls them in like an ether storm!" Together with the remarkable planetoid man, they reached the ship. Above them, dark, tumbling shapes blotted out the stars and silently moved on. Joe opened the gangway door. "Come on in, pal," he said to Genius. "We're shoving off." The planetoid man grinned foolishly. "Can't go arong with you," he said with an apologetic manner. "I rike to, but pressure fratten me out if I go." "What in solar blazes are you talking about?" Harvey asked. "I grow up on pranetoid," Genius explained. "On big pranet, too much pressure for me." The two salesmen looked narrowly at each other. "Did Johnson know that when he sold you?" Joe snarled. "Oh, sure." The silly grin became wider than ever. "Peopre from Earth buy me rots of times. I never reave pranetoid, though." "Joseph," Harvey said ominously, "that slick colonist has put one over upon us. What is our customary procedure in that event?" "We tear him apart," Joe replied between his teeth. "Not Mister Johnson," advised Genius. "Have gun and badge. He shoot you first and then rock you up in prison." Harvey paused, his ominous air vanishing. "True. There is also the fact, Joseph, that when he discovers the scrambled rectifier in the radio we sold him, he will have been paid back in full for his regrettable dishonesty." Unwillingly, Joe agreed. While Genius retreated to a safe distance, they entered the ship and blasted off. Within a few minutes the automatic steering pilot had maneuvered them above the plane of the asteroid belt. "I got kind of dizzy," Joe said, "there were so many deals back and forth. How much did we make on the sucker?" "A goodly amount, I wager," Harvey responded. He took out a pencil and paper. "Medicine, 469.50; radio, 1,000; batteries, 199. Total—let's see—1668 buckos and 50 redsents. A goodly sum, as I told you." He emptied his pockets of money, spread it out on the astrogation table and began counting. Finished, he looked up, troubled. "How much did we have when we landed, Joseph?" "Exactly 1668 buckos," Joe answered promptly. "I can't understand it," said Harvey. "Instead of double our capital, we now have only 1668 buckos and 50 redsents!" Feverishly, he returned to his pencil and paper. "Drinking water, 790; battery water, free; meal, 328; planetoid man, 550. Total: 1668 buckos!" He stared at the figures. "We paid out almost as much as we took in," he said bitterly. "Despite our intensive efforts, we made the absurd sum of fifty redsents." "Why, the dirty crook!" Joe growled. But after a few moments of sad reflection, Harvey became philosophical. "Perhaps, Joseph, we are more fortunate than we realize. We were, after all, completely in Johnson's power. The more I ponder, the more I believe we were lucky to escape. And, anyhow, we did make fifty redsents on the swindler. A moral victory, my boy." Joe, who had been sunk desparingly into a chair, now stood up slowly and asked: "Remember that bottle-opener we gave him?" "Certainly," Harvey explained. "What about it?" "How much did it cost us?" Harvey's eyebrows puckered. Suddenly he started laughing. "You're right, Joseph. We paid forty-six redsents for it on Venus. So, after all that transacting of business, we made four redsents!" "Four redsents, hell!" Joe snapped. "That was the sales tax!" He glared; then a smile lifted his mouth. "You remember those yokels on Mars' Flatlands, and the way they worshipped gold?" " Goldbricks! " Harvey said succinctly. Grinning, Joe set the robot-controls for Mars.

How does Johnson demonstrate that he's a formidable opponent to Joe and Harvey?

3

Throughout the story, the two groups of people (Joe and Harvey, the travelers, and Johnson and Genius, the locals) are constantly trying to trick one another in ways that the others do not see coming. Joe and Harvey think that they are excellent conmen; they say they are salesman who are traveling, but show throughout the story that they are the type to find the best deal for themselves in any way possible. Johnson, the man who runs the bar and the legal system on Planetoid 42, is ready to rise to the occasion. In fact, at the end of the story, they break even and neither side has actually gained any money. Whenever Joe and Harvey are trying to pull one of their scams, Johnson maintains an uninterested air and tries to not give away any interest in anything the visitors may have to sell him. He always acts as if he needs to be convinced by something, and does not let on what he is trying to pull something over on Joe and Harvey. He also finds very sneaky ways of getting money from them, playing on the visitors’ limited knowledge of the planetoid and its environment. This is how he originally sells them on the idea that he has to charge for water, but it is not his only tactic. He presents them with a menu that has very inexpensive prices for food, but does not mention the extremely small print on the bottom of the menu that shows an exorbitant service charge for the entertainment. These types of ploys have something in common: he tries to set up a situation to make it look very normal for his environment on the planetoid, but hides the information necessary for visitors to make an informed decision. This includes selling Genius near the end of the story, which is a con he has apparently run many times. Because he expects visitors to not think about the biology of the creatures who live on the planetoid, he is able to sell the flashy exterior, in this case his assistant’s capabilities, while there is always a hidden piece of information underneath.

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Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net GRIFTERS' ASTEROID By H. L. GOLD Harvey and Joe were the slickest con-men ever to gyp a space-lane sucker. Or so they thought! Angus Johnson knew differently. He charged them five buckos for a glass of water—and got it! [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories May 1943. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Characteristically, Harvey Ellsworth tried to maintain his dignity, though his parched tongue was almost hanging out. But Joe Mallon, with no dignity to maintain, lurched across the rubbish-strewn patch of land that had been termed a spaceport. When Harvey staggered pontifically into the battered metalloy saloon—the only one on Planetoid 42—his tall, gangling partner was already stumbling out, mouthing something incoherent. They met in the doorway, violently. "We're delirious!" Joe cried. "It's a mirage!" "What is?" asked Harvey through a mouthful of cotton. Joe reeled aside, and Harvey saw what had upset his partner. He stared, speechless for once. In their hectic voyages from planet to planet, the pair of panacea purveyors had encountered the usual strange life-forms. But never had they seen anything like the amazing creature in that colonial saloon. Paying no attention to them, it was carrying a case of liquor in two hands, six siphons in two others, and a broom and dustpan in the remaining pair. The bartender, a big man resembling the plumpish Harvey in build, was leaning negligently on the counter, ordering this impossible being to fill the partly-emptied bottles, squeeze fruit juice and sweep the floor, all of which the native did simultaneously. "Nonsense," Harvey croaked uncertainly. "We have seen enough queer things to know there are always more." He led the way inside. Through thirst-cracked lips he rasped: "Water—quick!" Without a word, the bartender reached under the counter, brought out two glasses of water. The interplanetary con-men drank noisily, asked for more, until they had drunk eight glasses. Meanwhile, the bartender had taken out eight jiggers and filled them with whiskey. Harvey and Joe were breathing hard from having gulped the water so fast, but they were beginning to revive. They noticed the bartender's impersonal eyes studying them shrewdly. "Strangers, eh?" he asked at last. "Solar salesmen, my colonial friend," Harvey answered in his usual lush manner. "We purvey that renowned Martian remedy, La-anago Yergis , the formula for which was recently discovered by ourselves in the ancient ruined city of La-anago. Medical science is unanimous in proclaiming this magic medicine the sole panacea in the entire history of therapeutics." "Yeah?" said the bartender disinterestedly, polishing the chaser glasses without washing them. "Where you heading?" "Out of Mars for Ganymede. Our condenser broke down, and we've gone without water for five ghastly days." "Got a mechanic around this dumping ground you call a port?" Joe asked. "We did. He came near starving and moved on to Titan. Ships don't land here unless they're in trouble." "Then where's the water lead-in? We'll fill up and push off." "Mayor takes care of that," replied the saloon owner. "If you gents're finished at the bar, your drinks'll be forty buckos." Harvey grinned puzzledly. "We didn't take any whiskey." "Might as well. Water's five buckos a glass. Liquor's free with every chaser." Harvey's eyes bulged. Joe gulped. "That—that's robbery!" the lanky man managed to get out in a thin quaver. The barkeeper shrugged. "When there ain't many customers, you gotta make more on each one. Besides—" "Besides nothing!" Joe roared, finding his voice again. "You dirty crook—robbing poor spacemen! You—" "You dirty crook!" Joe roared. "Robbing honest spacemen!" Harvey nudged him warningly. "Easy, my boy, easy." He turned to the bartender apologetically. "Don't mind my friend. His adrenal glands are sometimes overactive. You were going to say—?" The round face of the barkeeper had assumed an aggrieved expression. "Folks are always thinkin' the other feller's out to do 'em," he said, shaking his head. "Lemme explain about the water here. It's bitter as some kinds of sin before it's purified. Have to bring it in with buckets and make it sweet. That takes time and labor. Waddya think—I was chargin' feller critters for water just out of devilment? I charge because I gotta." "Friend," said Harvey, taking out a wallet and counting off eight five-bucko bills, "here is your money. What's fair is fair, and you have put a different complexion on what seemed at first to be an unconscionable interjection of a middleman between Nature and man's thirst." The saloon man removed his dirty apron and came around the bar. "If that's an apology, I accept it. Now the mayor'll discuss filling your tanks. That's me. I'm also justice of the peace, official recorder, fire chief...." "And chief of police, no doubt," said Harvey jocosely. "Nope. That's my son, Jed. Angus Johnson's my name. Folks here just call me Chief. I run this town, and run it right. How much water will you need?" Joe estimated quickly. "About seventy-five liters, if we go on half rations," he answered. He waited apprehensively. "Let's say ten buckos a liter," the mayor said. "On account of the quantity, I'm able to quote a bargain price. Shucks, boys, it hurts me more to charge for water than it does for you to pay. I just got to, that's all." The mayor gestured to the native, who shuffled out to the tanks with them. The planetoid man worked the pump while the mayor intently watched the crude level-gauge, crying "Stop!" when it registered the proper amount. Then Johnson rubbed his thumb on his index finger and wetted his lips expectantly. Harvey bravely counted off the bills. He asked: "But what are we to do about replenishing our battery fluid? Ten buckos a liter would be preposterous. We simply can't afford it." Johnson's response almost floored them. "Who said anything about charging you for battery water? You can have all you want for nothing. It's just the purified stuff that comes so high." After giving them directions that would take them to the free-water pool, the ponderous factotum of Planetoid 42 shook hands and headed back to the saloon. His six-armed assistant followed him inside. "Now do you see, my hot-tempered colleague?" said Harvey as he and Joe picked up buckets that hung on the tank. "Johnson, as I saw instantly, is the victim of a difficult environment, and must charge accordingly." "Just the same," Joe griped, "paying for water isn't something you can get used to in ten minutes." In the fragile forest, they soon came across a stream that sprang from the igneous soil and splashed into the small pond whose contents, according to the mayor, was theirs for the asking. They filled their buckets and hauled them to the ship, then returned for more. It was on the sixth trip that Joe caught a glimpse of Jupiter-shine on a bright surface off to the left. The figure, 750, with the bucko sign in front of it, was still doing acrobatics inside his skull and keeping a faint suspicion alive in him. So he called Harvey and they went to investigate. Among the skimpy ground-crawling vines, they saw a long slender mound that was unmistakably a buried pipe. "What's this doing here?" Harvey asked, puzzled. "I thought Johnson had to transport water in pails." "Wonder where it leads to," Joe said uneasily. "It leads to the saloon," said Harvey, his eyes rapidly tracing the pipe back toward the spaceport. "What I am concerned with is where it leads from ." Five minutes later, panting heavily from the unaccustomed exertion of scrambling through the tangle of planetorial undergrowth, they burst into the open—before a clear, sparkling pool. Mutely, Harvey pointed out a pipe-end jutting under the water. "I am growing suspicious," he said in a rigidly controlled voice. But Joe was already on his knees, scooping up a handful of water and tasting it. "Sweet!" he snarled. They rushed back to the first pool, where Joe again tasted a sample. His mouth went wry. "Bitter! He uses only one pool, the sweet one! The only thing that needs purifying around here is that blasted mayor's conscience." "The asteroidal Poobah has tricked us with a slick come-on," said Harvey slowly. His eyes grew cold. "Joseph, the good-natured artist in me has become a hard and merciless avenger. I shall not rest until we have had the best of this colonial con-man! Watch your cues from this point hence." Fists clenched, the two returned to the saloon. But at the door they stopped and their fists unclenched. "Thought you gents were leaving," the mayor called out, seeing them frozen in the doorway. "Glad you didn't. Now you can meet my son, Jed. Him and me are the whole Earthman population of Johnson City." "You don't need any more," said Harvey, dismayed. Johnson's eight-foot son, topped by a massive roof of sun-bleached hair and held up by a foundation that seemed immovable, had obviously been born and raised in low gravity. For any decent-sized world would have kept him down near the general dimensions of a man. He held out an acre of palm. Harvey studied it worriedly, put his own hand somewhere on it, swallowed as it closed, then breathed again when his fingers were released in five units instead of a single compressed one. "Pleased to meet you," piped a voice that had never known a dense atmosphere. The pursuit of vengeance, Harvey realized, had taken a quick and unpleasant turn. Something shrewd was called for.... "Joseph!" he exclaimed, looking at his partner in alarm. "Don't you feel well?" Even before the others could turn to him, Joe's practiced eyes were gently crossing. He sagged against the door frame, all his features drooping like a bloodhound's. "Bring him in here!" Johnson cried. "I mean, get him away! He's coming down with asteroid fever!" "Of course," replied Harvey calmly. "Any fool knows the first symptoms of the disease that once scourged the universe." "What do you mean, once ?" demanded Johnson. "I come down with it every year, and I ain't hankering to have it in an off-season. Get him out of here!" "In good time. He can't be moved immediately." "Then he'll be here for months!" Harvey helped Joe to the counter and lifted him up on it. The mayor and his gigantic offspring were cowering across the room, trying to breathe in tiny, uncontaminating gasps. "You'll find everything you want in the back room," Johnson said frantically, "sulfopyridine, mustard plasters, rubs, inhalers, suction cups—" "Relics of the past," Harvey stated. "One medication is all modern man requires to combat the dread menace, asteroid fever." "What's that?" asked the mayor without conviction. Instead of replying, Harvey hurried outside to the ungainly second-hand rocket ship in the center of the shabby spaceport. He returned within a few minutes, carrying a bottle. Joe was still stretched out on the bar, panting, his eyes slowly crossing and uncrossing. Harvey lifted the patient's head tenderly, put the bottle to his lips and tilted it until he was forced to drink. When Joe tried to pull away, Harvey was inexorable. He made his partner drink until most of the liquid was gone. Then he stepped back and waited for the inevitable result. Joe's performance was better than ever. He lay supine for several moments, his face twisted into an expression that seemed doomed to perpetual wryness. Slowly, however, he sat up and his features straightened out. "Are—are you all right?" asked the mayor anxiously. "Much better," said Joe in a weak voice. "Maybe you need another dose," Harvey suggested. Joe recoiled. "I'm fine now!" he cried, and sprang off the bar to prove it. Astonished, Johnson and his son drew closer. They searched Joe's face, and then the mayor timidly felt his pulse. "Well, I'll be hanged!" Johnson ejaculated. " La-anago Yergis never fails, my friend," Harvey explained. "By actual test, it conquers asteroid fever in from four to twenty-three minutes, depending on the severity of the attack. Luckily, we caught this one before it grew formidable." The mayor's eyes became clouded mirrors of an inward conflict. "If you don't charge too much," he said warily, "I might think of buying some." "We do not sell this unbelievable remedy," Harvey replied with dignity. "It sells itself." "'Course, I'd expect a considerable reduction if I bought a whole case," said Johnson. "That would be the smallest investment you could make, compared with the vast loss of time and strength the fever involves." "How much?" asked the mayor unhappily. "For you, since you have taken us in so hospitably, a mere five hundred buckos." Johnson did not actually stagger back, but he gave the impression of doing so. "F-four hundred," he offered. "Not a red cent less than four seventy-five," Harvey said flatly. "Make it four fifty," quavered Johnson. "I dislike haggling," said Harvey. The final price, however, was four hundred and sixty-nine buckos and fifty redsents. Magnanimously, Harvey added: "And we will include, gratis , an elegant bottle-opener, a superb product of Mercurian handicraftsmanship." Johnson stabbed out a warning finger. "No tricks now. I want a taste of that stuff. You're not switching some worthless junk on me." Harvey took a glass from the bar and poured him a generous sample. The mayor sniffed it, grimaced, then threw it down his gullet. The ensuing minute saw a grim battle between a man and his stomach, a battle which the man gradually won. "There ain't no words for that taste," he gulped when it was safe to talk again. "Medicine," Harvey propounded, "should taste like medicine." To Joe he said: "Come, my esteemed colleague. We must perform the sacred task to which we have dedicated ourselves." With Joe stumbling along behind, he left the saloon, crossed the clearing and entered the ship. As soon as they were inside, Joe dropped his murderous silence and cried: "What kind of a dirty trick was that, giving me poison instead of that snake oil?" "That was not poison," Harvey contradicted quietly. "It was La-anago Yergis extract, plus." "Plus what—arsenic?" "Now, Joseph! Consider my quandary when I came back here to manufacture our specific for all known ailments, with the intention of selling yonder asteroidal tin-horn a bill of medical goods—an entire case, mind you. Was I to mix the extract with the water for which we had been swindled to the tune of ten buckos a liter? Where would our profit have been, then? No; I had to use the bitter free water, of course." "But why use it on me?" Joe demanded furiously. Harvey looked reprovingly at his gangling partner. "Did Johnson ask to taste it, or did he not? One must look ahead, Joseph. I had to produce the same medicine that we will now manufacture. Thus, you were a guinea pig for a splendid cause." "Okay, okay," Joe said. "But you shoulda charged him more." "Joseph, I promise you that we shall get back every redsent of which that swindler cheated us, besides whatever other funds or valuables he possesses. We could not be content with less." "Well, we're starting all right," admitted Joe. "How about that thing with six arms? He looks like a valuable. Can't we grab him off?" Harvey stopped filling bottles and looked up pensively. "I have every hope of luring away the profitable monstrosity. Apparently you have also surmised the fortune we could make with him. At first I purpose to exhibit him on our interplanetary tours with our streamlined panacea; he would be a spectacular attraction for bucolic suckers. Later, a brief period of demonstrating his abilities on the audio-visiphone. Then our triumph—we shall sell him at a stupendous figure to the zoo!" Joe was still dazed by that monetary vista when he and Harvey carried the case of medicine to the saloon. The mayor had already cleared a place of honor in the cluttered back room, where he told them to put it down carefully. Then he took the elaborate bottle-opener Harvey gave him, reverently uncorked a bottle and sampled it. It must have been at least as good as the first; he gagged. "That's the stuff, all right," he said, swallowing hard. He counted out the money into Harvey's hand, at a moderate rate that precariously balanced between his pleasure at getting the fever remedy and his pain at paying for it. Then he glanced out to see the position of Jupiter, and asked: "You gents eaten yet? The restaurant's open now." Harvey and Joe looked at each other. They hadn't been thinking about food at all, but suddenly they realized that they were hungry. "It's only water we were short of," Harvey said apprehensively. "We've got rations back at the ship." " H-mph! " the mayor grunted. "Powdered concentrates. Compressed pap. Suit yourselves. We treat our stomachs better here. And you're welcome to our hospitality." "Your hospitality," said Harvey, "depends on the prices you charge." "Well, if that's what's worrying you, you can stop worrying," answered the mayor promptly. "What's more, the kind of dinner I serve here you can't get anywhere else for any price." Swiftly, Harvey conned the possibilities of being bilked again. He saw none. "Let's take a look at the menu, anyhow, Joe," he said guardedly. Johnson immediately fell into the role of "mine host." "Come right in, gents," he invited. "Right into the dining room." He seated them at a table, which a rope tied between posts made more or less private, though nobody else was in the saloon and there was little chance of company. Genius, the six-armed native, appeared from the dingy kitchen with two menus in one hand, two glasses of water in another, plus napkins, silverware, a pitcher, plates, saucers, cups, and their cocktails, which were on the house. Then he stood by for orders. Harvey and Joe studied the menu critically. The prices were phenomenally low. When they glanced up at Johnson in perplexity, he grinned, bowed and asked: "Everything satisfactory, gents?" "Quite," said Harvey. "We shall order." For an hour they were served amazing dishes, both fresh and canned, the culinary wealth of this planetoid and all the system. And the service was as extraordinary as the meal itself. With four hands, Genius played deftly upon a pair of mellow Venusian viotars , using his other two hands for waiting on the table. "We absolutely must purchase this incredible specimen," Harvey whispered excitedly when Johnson and the native were both in the kitchen, attending to the next course. "He would make any society hostess's season a riotous success, which should be worth a great sum to women like Mrs. van Schuyler-Morgan, merely for his hire." "Think of a fast one fast," Joe agreed. "You're right." "But I dislike having to revise my opinion of a man so often," complained Harvey. "I wish Johnson would stay either swindler or honest merchant. This dinner is worth as least twenty buckos, yet I estimate our check at a mere bucko twenty redsents." The mayor's appearance prevented them from continuing the discussion. "It's been a great honor, gents," he said. "Ain't often I have visitors, and I like the best, like you two gents." As if on cue, Genius came out and put the check down between Joe and Harvey. Harvey picked it up negligently, but his casual air vanished in a yelp of horror. "What the devil is this?" he shouted.—"How do you arrive at this fantastic, idiotic figure— three hundred and twenty-eight buckos !" Johnson didn't answer. Neither did Genius; he simply put on the table, not a fingerbowl, but a magnifying glass. With one of his thirty fingers he pointed politely to the bottom of the menu. Harvey focused on the microscopic print, and his face went pasty with rage. The minute note read: "Services and entertainment, 327 buckos 80 redsents." "You can go to hell!" Joe growled. "We won't pay it!" Johnson sighed ponderously. "I was afraid you'd act like that," he said with regret. He pulled a tin badge out of his rear pocket, pinned it on his vest, and twisted his holstered gun into view. "Afraid I'll have to ask the sheriff to take over." Johnson, the "sheriff," collected the money, and Johnson, the "restaurateur," pocketed it. Meanwhile, Harvey tipped Joe the sign to remain calm. "My friend," he said to the mayor, and his tones took on a schoolmasterish severity, "your long absence from Earth has perhaps made you forget those elements of human wisdom that have entered the folk-lore of your native planet. Such as, for example: 'It is folly to kill a goose that lays golden eggs,' and 'Penny wise is pound foolish.'" "I don't get the connection," objected Johnson. "Well, by obliging us to pay such a high price for your dinner, you put out of your reach the chance of profiting from a really substantial deal. My partner and I were prepared to make you a sizable offer for the peculiar creature you call Genius. But by reducing our funds the way you have—" "Who said I wanted to sell him?" the mayor interrupted. He rubbed his fingers together and asked disinterestedly: "What were you going to offer, anyhow?" "It doesn't matter any longer," Harvey said with elaborate carelessness. "Perhaps you wouldn't have accepted it, anyway." "That's right," Johnson came back emphatically. "But what would your offer have been which I would have turned down?" "Which one? The one we were going to make, or the one we can make now?" "Either one. It don't make no difference. Genius is too valuable to sell." "Oh, come now, Mr. Johnson. Don't tell me no amount of money would tempt you!" "Nope. But how much did you say?" "Ah, then you will consider releasing Genius!" "Well, I'll tell you something," said the mayor confidentially. "When you've got one thing, you've got one thing. But when you've got money, it's the same as having a lot of things. Because, if you've got money, you can buy this and that and this and that and—" "This and that," concluded Joe. "We'll give you five hundred buckos." "Now, gents!" Johnson remonstrated. "Why, six hundred would hardly—" "You haven't left us much money," Harvey put in. The mayor frowned. "All right, we'll split the difference. Make it five-fifty." Harvey was quick to pay out, for this was a genuine windfall. Then he stood up and admired the astonishing possession he had so inexpensively acquired. "I really hate to deprive you of this unique creature," he said to Johnson. "I should imagine you will be rather lonely, with only your filial mammoth to keep you company." "I sure will," Johnson confessed glumly. "I got pretty attached to Genius, and I'm going to miss him something awful." Harvey forcibly removed his eyes from the native, who was clearing off the table almost all at once. "My friend," he said, "we take your only solace, it is true, but in his place we can offer something no less amazing and instructive." The mayor's hand went protectively to his pocket. "What is it?" he asked with the suspicion of a man who has seen human nature at its worst and expects nothing better. "Joseph, get our most prized belonging from the communications room of the ship," Harvey instructed. To Johnson he explained: "You must see the wondrous instrument before its value can be appreciated. My partner will soon have it here for your astonishment." Joe's face grew as glum as Johnson's had been. "Aw, Harv," he protested, "do we have to sell it? And right when I thought we were getting the key!" "We must not be selfish, my boy," Harvey said nobly. "We have had our chance; now we must relinquish Fate to the hands of a man who might have more success than we. Go, Joseph. Bring it here." Unwillingly, Joe turned and shuffled out. On a larger and heavier world than Planetoid 42, Johnson's curiosity would probably have had weight and mass. He was bursting with questions, but he was obviously afraid they would cost him money. For his part, Harvey allowed that curiosity to grow like a Venusian amoeba until Joe came in, lugging a radio. "Is that what you were talking about?" the mayor snorted. "What makes you think I want a radio? I came here to get away from singers and political speech-makers." "Do not jump to hasty conclusions," Harvey cautioned. "Another word, and I shall refuse you the greatest opportunity any man has ever had, with the sole exceptions of Joseph, myself and the unfortunate inventor of this absolutely awe-inspiring device." "I ain't in the market for a radio," Johnson said stubbornly. Harvey nodded in relief. "We have attempted to repay our host, Joseph. He has spurned our generosity. We have now the chance to continue our study, which I am positive will soon reward us with the key to an enormous fortune." "Well, that's no plating off our bow," Joe grunted. "I'm glad he did turn it down. I hated to give it up after working on it for three whole years." He picked up the radio and began walking toward the door. "Now, hold on!" the mayor cried. "I ain't saying I'll buy, but what is it I'm turning down?" Joe returned and set the instrument down on the bar. His face sorrowful, Harvey fondly stroked the scarred plasticoid cabinet. "To make a long story, Mr. Johnson," he said, "Joseph and I were among the chosen few who knew the famous Doctor Dean intimately. Just before his tragic death, you will recall, Dean allegedly went insane." He banged his fist on the bar. "I have said it before, and I repeat again, that was a malicious lie, spread by the doctor's enemies to discredit his greatest invention—this fourth dimensional radio!" "This what?" Johnson blurted out. "In simple terms," clarified Harvey, "the ingenious doctor discovered that the yawning chasm between the dimensions could be bridged by energy of all quanta. There has never been any question that the inhabitants of the super-dimension would be far more civilized than ourselves. Consequently, the man who could tap their knowledge would find himself in possession of a powerful, undreamt-of science!" The mayor looked respectfully at the silent box on the bar. "And this thing gets broadcasts from the fourth dimension?" "It does, Mr. Johnson! Only charlatans like those who envied Doctor Dean's magnificent accomplishments could deny that fact." The mayor put his hands in his pockets, unswiveled one hip and stared thoughtfully at the battered cabinet. "Well, let's say it picks up fourth dimensional broadcasts," he conceded. "But how could you understand what they're saying? Folks up there wouldn't talk our language." Again Harvey smashed his fist down. "Do you dare to repeat the scurvy lie that broke Dean's spirit and drove him to suicide?" Johnson recoiled. "No—no, of course not . I mean, being up here, I naturally couldn't get all the details." "Naturally," Harvey agreed, mollified. "I'm sorry I lost my temper. But it is a matter of record that the doctor proved the broadcasts emanating from the super-dimension were in English! Why should that be so difficult to believe? Is it impossible that at one time there was communication between the dimensions, that the super-beings admired our language and adopted it in all its beauty, adding to it their own hyper-scientific trimmings?" "Why, I don't know," Johnson said in confusion. "For three years, Joseph and I lost sleep and hair, trying to detect the simple key that would translate the somewhat metamorphosed broadcasts into our primitive English. It eluded us. Even the doctor failed. But that was understandable; a sensitive soul like his could stand only so much. And the combination of ridicule and failure to solve the mystery caused him to take his own life." Johnson winced. "Is that what you want to unload on me?" "For a very good reason, sir. Patience is the virtue that will be rewarded with the key to these fourth dimensional broadcasts. A man who could devote his life to improving this lonely worldlet is obviously a person with unusual patience." "Yeah," the mayor said grudgingly, "I ain't exactly flighty." "Therefore, you are the man who could unravel the problem!" Johnson asked skeptically: "How about a sample first?" Harvey turned a knob on the face of the scarred radio. After several squeals of spatial figures, a smooth voice began: "There are omnious pleajes of moby-hailegs in sonmirand which, howgraismon, are notch to be donfured miss ellasellabell in either or both hagasanipaj, by all means. This does not refly, on the brother man, nat or mizzafil saces are denuded by this ossifaligo...." Harvey switched off the set determinedly. "Wait a minute!" Johnson begged. "I almost got it then!" "I dislike being commercial," said Harvey, "but this astounding device still belongs to us. Would we not be foolish to let you discover the clue before purchasing the right to do so?" The mayor nodded indecisively, looking at the radio with agonized longing. "How much do you want?" he asked unhappily. "One thousand buckos, and no haggling. I am not in the mood." Johnson opened his mouth to argue; then, seeing Harvey's set features, paid with the worst possible grace. "Don't you think we ought to tell him about the batteries, Harv?" Joe asked. "What about the batteries?" demanded Johnson with deadly calm. "A very small matter," Harvey said airily. "You see, we have been analyzing these broadcasts for three years. In that time, of course, the batteries are bound to weaken. I estimate these should last not less than one Terrestrial month, at the very least." "What do I do then?" Harvey shrugged. "Special batteries are required, which I see Joseph has by chance brought along. For the batteries, the only ones of their kind left in the system, I ask only what they cost—one hundred and ninety-nine buckos, no more and, on the other hand, no less." Johnson was breathing hard, and his hand hovered dangerously near his gun. But he paid the amount Harvey wanted. Moreover, he actually shook hands when the two panacea purveyors collected their six-armed prize and said goodbye. Before they were outside, however, he had turned on the radio and was listening tensely to a woman's highly cultured, though rather angry voice, saying: "Oh, you hannaforge are all beasa-taga-sanimort. If you rue amount it, how do you respench a pure woman to ansver go-samak—" "I'll get it!" they heard Johnson mutter. Then the sound of giant feet crossing the barroom floor reached their ears, and a shrill question: "What's that, Papa?" "A fortune, Jed! Those fakers are damned fools, selling us a thing like—" Joe gazed at Harvey admiringly. "Another one sold? Harv, that spiel pulls them in like an ether storm!" Together with the remarkable planetoid man, they reached the ship. Above them, dark, tumbling shapes blotted out the stars and silently moved on. Joe opened the gangway door. "Come on in, pal," he said to Genius. "We're shoving off." The planetoid man grinned foolishly. "Can't go arong with you," he said with an apologetic manner. "I rike to, but pressure fratten me out if I go." "What in solar blazes are you talking about?" Harvey asked. "I grow up on pranetoid," Genius explained. "On big pranet, too much pressure for me." The two salesmen looked narrowly at each other. "Did Johnson know that when he sold you?" Joe snarled. "Oh, sure." The silly grin became wider than ever. "Peopre from Earth buy me rots of times. I never reave pranetoid, though." "Joseph," Harvey said ominously, "that slick colonist has put one over upon us. What is our customary procedure in that event?" "We tear him apart," Joe replied between his teeth. "Not Mister Johnson," advised Genius. "Have gun and badge. He shoot you first and then rock you up in prison." Harvey paused, his ominous air vanishing. "True. There is also the fact, Joseph, that when he discovers the scrambled rectifier in the radio we sold him, he will have been paid back in full for his regrettable dishonesty." Unwillingly, Joe agreed. While Genius retreated to a safe distance, they entered the ship and blasted off. Within a few minutes the automatic steering pilot had maneuvered them above the plane of the asteroid belt. "I got kind of dizzy," Joe said, "there were so many deals back and forth. How much did we make on the sucker?" "A goodly amount, I wager," Harvey responded. He took out a pencil and paper. "Medicine, 469.50; radio, 1,000; batteries, 199. Total—let's see—1668 buckos and 50 redsents. A goodly sum, as I told you." He emptied his pockets of money, spread it out on the astrogation table and began counting. Finished, he looked up, troubled. "How much did we have when we landed, Joseph?" "Exactly 1668 buckos," Joe answered promptly. "I can't understand it," said Harvey. "Instead of double our capital, we now have only 1668 buckos and 50 redsents!" Feverishly, he returned to his pencil and paper. "Drinking water, 790; battery water, free; meal, 328; planetoid man, 550. Total: 1668 buckos!" He stared at the figures. "We paid out almost as much as we took in," he said bitterly. "Despite our intensive efforts, we made the absurd sum of fifty redsents." "Why, the dirty crook!" Joe growled. But after a few moments of sad reflection, Harvey became philosophical. "Perhaps, Joseph, we are more fortunate than we realize. We were, after all, completely in Johnson's power. The more I ponder, the more I believe we were lucky to escape. And, anyhow, we did make fifty redsents on the swindler. A moral victory, my boy." Joe, who had been sunk desparingly into a chair, now stood up slowly and asked: "Remember that bottle-opener we gave him?" "Certainly," Harvey explained. "What about it?" "How much did it cost us?" Harvey's eyebrows puckered. Suddenly he started laughing. "You're right, Joseph. We paid forty-six redsents for it on Venus. So, after all that transacting of business, we made four redsents!" "Four redsents, hell!" Joe snapped. "That was the sales tax!" He glared; then a smile lifted his mouth. "You remember those yokels on Mars' Flatlands, and the way they worshipped gold?" " Goldbricks! " Harvey said succinctly. Grinning, Joe set the robot-controls for Mars.

Describe the setting of the story.

1

Planetoid 42 is a place without much to offer besides a port. It is heavily polluted, covered in plants that are similar to vines, and boasts only one saloon. It is home to only two humans, Johnson and his son Jeb, and Genius, a fantastic creature with six limbs that is unlike anything Joe and Harvey have ever seen before. The planet has gravity, which made it possible for Jed to grow to eight feet tall. Genius is also able to thrive on Planetoid 42 while he would perish on other planets with more gravity. Although Johnson says that the water must be purified so it doesn’t taste bitter, the truth is that there’s a large pool with sweet water on the planet. Johnson insists that he has to charge a lot of money for water in part because he has very few customers. The planet is mostly deserted and people only show up to his bar if they’re in trouble.Johnson makes the rules because he is in charge of everything. He is the sheriff, fire chief, mayor, justice of the peace, and restaurateur.

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Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net GRIFTERS' ASTEROID By H. L. GOLD Harvey and Joe were the slickest con-men ever to gyp a space-lane sucker. Or so they thought! Angus Johnson knew differently. He charged them five buckos for a glass of water—and got it! [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories May 1943. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Characteristically, Harvey Ellsworth tried to maintain his dignity, though his parched tongue was almost hanging out. But Joe Mallon, with no dignity to maintain, lurched across the rubbish-strewn patch of land that had been termed a spaceport. When Harvey staggered pontifically into the battered metalloy saloon—the only one on Planetoid 42—his tall, gangling partner was already stumbling out, mouthing something incoherent. They met in the doorway, violently. "We're delirious!" Joe cried. "It's a mirage!" "What is?" asked Harvey through a mouthful of cotton. Joe reeled aside, and Harvey saw what had upset his partner. He stared, speechless for once. In their hectic voyages from planet to planet, the pair of panacea purveyors had encountered the usual strange life-forms. But never had they seen anything like the amazing creature in that colonial saloon. Paying no attention to them, it was carrying a case of liquor in two hands, six siphons in two others, and a broom and dustpan in the remaining pair. The bartender, a big man resembling the plumpish Harvey in build, was leaning negligently on the counter, ordering this impossible being to fill the partly-emptied bottles, squeeze fruit juice and sweep the floor, all of which the native did simultaneously. "Nonsense," Harvey croaked uncertainly. "We have seen enough queer things to know there are always more." He led the way inside. Through thirst-cracked lips he rasped: "Water—quick!" Without a word, the bartender reached under the counter, brought out two glasses of water. The interplanetary con-men drank noisily, asked for more, until they had drunk eight glasses. Meanwhile, the bartender had taken out eight jiggers and filled them with whiskey. Harvey and Joe were breathing hard from having gulped the water so fast, but they were beginning to revive. They noticed the bartender's impersonal eyes studying them shrewdly. "Strangers, eh?" he asked at last. "Solar salesmen, my colonial friend," Harvey answered in his usual lush manner. "We purvey that renowned Martian remedy, La-anago Yergis , the formula for which was recently discovered by ourselves in the ancient ruined city of La-anago. Medical science is unanimous in proclaiming this magic medicine the sole panacea in the entire history of therapeutics." "Yeah?" said the bartender disinterestedly, polishing the chaser glasses without washing them. "Where you heading?" "Out of Mars for Ganymede. Our condenser broke down, and we've gone without water for five ghastly days." "Got a mechanic around this dumping ground you call a port?" Joe asked. "We did. He came near starving and moved on to Titan. Ships don't land here unless they're in trouble." "Then where's the water lead-in? We'll fill up and push off." "Mayor takes care of that," replied the saloon owner. "If you gents're finished at the bar, your drinks'll be forty buckos." Harvey grinned puzzledly. "We didn't take any whiskey." "Might as well. Water's five buckos a glass. Liquor's free with every chaser." Harvey's eyes bulged. Joe gulped. "That—that's robbery!" the lanky man managed to get out in a thin quaver. The barkeeper shrugged. "When there ain't many customers, you gotta make more on each one. Besides—" "Besides nothing!" Joe roared, finding his voice again. "You dirty crook—robbing poor spacemen! You—" "You dirty crook!" Joe roared. "Robbing honest spacemen!" Harvey nudged him warningly. "Easy, my boy, easy." He turned to the bartender apologetically. "Don't mind my friend. His adrenal glands are sometimes overactive. You were going to say—?" The round face of the barkeeper had assumed an aggrieved expression. "Folks are always thinkin' the other feller's out to do 'em," he said, shaking his head. "Lemme explain about the water here. It's bitter as some kinds of sin before it's purified. Have to bring it in with buckets and make it sweet. That takes time and labor. Waddya think—I was chargin' feller critters for water just out of devilment? I charge because I gotta." "Friend," said Harvey, taking out a wallet and counting off eight five-bucko bills, "here is your money. What's fair is fair, and you have put a different complexion on what seemed at first to be an unconscionable interjection of a middleman between Nature and man's thirst." The saloon man removed his dirty apron and came around the bar. "If that's an apology, I accept it. Now the mayor'll discuss filling your tanks. That's me. I'm also justice of the peace, official recorder, fire chief...." "And chief of police, no doubt," said Harvey jocosely. "Nope. That's my son, Jed. Angus Johnson's my name. Folks here just call me Chief. I run this town, and run it right. How much water will you need?" Joe estimated quickly. "About seventy-five liters, if we go on half rations," he answered. He waited apprehensively. "Let's say ten buckos a liter," the mayor said. "On account of the quantity, I'm able to quote a bargain price. Shucks, boys, it hurts me more to charge for water than it does for you to pay. I just got to, that's all." The mayor gestured to the native, who shuffled out to the tanks with them. The planetoid man worked the pump while the mayor intently watched the crude level-gauge, crying "Stop!" when it registered the proper amount. Then Johnson rubbed his thumb on his index finger and wetted his lips expectantly. Harvey bravely counted off the bills. He asked: "But what are we to do about replenishing our battery fluid? Ten buckos a liter would be preposterous. We simply can't afford it." Johnson's response almost floored them. "Who said anything about charging you for battery water? You can have all you want for nothing. It's just the purified stuff that comes so high." After giving them directions that would take them to the free-water pool, the ponderous factotum of Planetoid 42 shook hands and headed back to the saloon. His six-armed assistant followed him inside. "Now do you see, my hot-tempered colleague?" said Harvey as he and Joe picked up buckets that hung on the tank. "Johnson, as I saw instantly, is the victim of a difficult environment, and must charge accordingly." "Just the same," Joe griped, "paying for water isn't something you can get used to in ten minutes." In the fragile forest, they soon came across a stream that sprang from the igneous soil and splashed into the small pond whose contents, according to the mayor, was theirs for the asking. They filled their buckets and hauled them to the ship, then returned for more. It was on the sixth trip that Joe caught a glimpse of Jupiter-shine on a bright surface off to the left. The figure, 750, with the bucko sign in front of it, was still doing acrobatics inside his skull and keeping a faint suspicion alive in him. So he called Harvey and they went to investigate. Among the skimpy ground-crawling vines, they saw a long slender mound that was unmistakably a buried pipe. "What's this doing here?" Harvey asked, puzzled. "I thought Johnson had to transport water in pails." "Wonder where it leads to," Joe said uneasily. "It leads to the saloon," said Harvey, his eyes rapidly tracing the pipe back toward the spaceport. "What I am concerned with is where it leads from ." Five minutes later, panting heavily from the unaccustomed exertion of scrambling through the tangle of planetorial undergrowth, they burst into the open—before a clear, sparkling pool. Mutely, Harvey pointed out a pipe-end jutting under the water. "I am growing suspicious," he said in a rigidly controlled voice. But Joe was already on his knees, scooping up a handful of water and tasting it. "Sweet!" he snarled. They rushed back to the first pool, where Joe again tasted a sample. His mouth went wry. "Bitter! He uses only one pool, the sweet one! The only thing that needs purifying around here is that blasted mayor's conscience." "The asteroidal Poobah has tricked us with a slick come-on," said Harvey slowly. His eyes grew cold. "Joseph, the good-natured artist in me has become a hard and merciless avenger. I shall not rest until we have had the best of this colonial con-man! Watch your cues from this point hence." Fists clenched, the two returned to the saloon. But at the door they stopped and their fists unclenched. "Thought you gents were leaving," the mayor called out, seeing them frozen in the doorway. "Glad you didn't. Now you can meet my son, Jed. Him and me are the whole Earthman population of Johnson City." "You don't need any more," said Harvey, dismayed. Johnson's eight-foot son, topped by a massive roof of sun-bleached hair and held up by a foundation that seemed immovable, had obviously been born and raised in low gravity. For any decent-sized world would have kept him down near the general dimensions of a man. He held out an acre of palm. Harvey studied it worriedly, put his own hand somewhere on it, swallowed as it closed, then breathed again when his fingers were released in five units instead of a single compressed one. "Pleased to meet you," piped a voice that had never known a dense atmosphere. The pursuit of vengeance, Harvey realized, had taken a quick and unpleasant turn. Something shrewd was called for.... "Joseph!" he exclaimed, looking at his partner in alarm. "Don't you feel well?" Even before the others could turn to him, Joe's practiced eyes were gently crossing. He sagged against the door frame, all his features drooping like a bloodhound's. "Bring him in here!" Johnson cried. "I mean, get him away! He's coming down with asteroid fever!" "Of course," replied Harvey calmly. "Any fool knows the first symptoms of the disease that once scourged the universe." "What do you mean, once ?" demanded Johnson. "I come down with it every year, and I ain't hankering to have it in an off-season. Get him out of here!" "In good time. He can't be moved immediately." "Then he'll be here for months!" Harvey helped Joe to the counter and lifted him up on it. The mayor and his gigantic offspring were cowering across the room, trying to breathe in tiny, uncontaminating gasps. "You'll find everything you want in the back room," Johnson said frantically, "sulfopyridine, mustard plasters, rubs, inhalers, suction cups—" "Relics of the past," Harvey stated. "One medication is all modern man requires to combat the dread menace, asteroid fever." "What's that?" asked the mayor without conviction. Instead of replying, Harvey hurried outside to the ungainly second-hand rocket ship in the center of the shabby spaceport. He returned within a few minutes, carrying a bottle. Joe was still stretched out on the bar, panting, his eyes slowly crossing and uncrossing. Harvey lifted the patient's head tenderly, put the bottle to his lips and tilted it until he was forced to drink. When Joe tried to pull away, Harvey was inexorable. He made his partner drink until most of the liquid was gone. Then he stepped back and waited for the inevitable result. Joe's performance was better than ever. He lay supine for several moments, his face twisted into an expression that seemed doomed to perpetual wryness. Slowly, however, he sat up and his features straightened out. "Are—are you all right?" asked the mayor anxiously. "Much better," said Joe in a weak voice. "Maybe you need another dose," Harvey suggested. Joe recoiled. "I'm fine now!" he cried, and sprang off the bar to prove it. Astonished, Johnson and his son drew closer. They searched Joe's face, and then the mayor timidly felt his pulse. "Well, I'll be hanged!" Johnson ejaculated. " La-anago Yergis never fails, my friend," Harvey explained. "By actual test, it conquers asteroid fever in from four to twenty-three minutes, depending on the severity of the attack. Luckily, we caught this one before it grew formidable." The mayor's eyes became clouded mirrors of an inward conflict. "If you don't charge too much," he said warily, "I might think of buying some." "We do not sell this unbelievable remedy," Harvey replied with dignity. "It sells itself." "'Course, I'd expect a considerable reduction if I bought a whole case," said Johnson. "That would be the smallest investment you could make, compared with the vast loss of time and strength the fever involves." "How much?" asked the mayor unhappily. "For you, since you have taken us in so hospitably, a mere five hundred buckos." Johnson did not actually stagger back, but he gave the impression of doing so. "F-four hundred," he offered. "Not a red cent less than four seventy-five," Harvey said flatly. "Make it four fifty," quavered Johnson. "I dislike haggling," said Harvey. The final price, however, was four hundred and sixty-nine buckos and fifty redsents. Magnanimously, Harvey added: "And we will include, gratis , an elegant bottle-opener, a superb product of Mercurian handicraftsmanship." Johnson stabbed out a warning finger. "No tricks now. I want a taste of that stuff. You're not switching some worthless junk on me." Harvey took a glass from the bar and poured him a generous sample. The mayor sniffed it, grimaced, then threw it down his gullet. The ensuing minute saw a grim battle between a man and his stomach, a battle which the man gradually won. "There ain't no words for that taste," he gulped when it was safe to talk again. "Medicine," Harvey propounded, "should taste like medicine." To Joe he said: "Come, my esteemed colleague. We must perform the sacred task to which we have dedicated ourselves." With Joe stumbling along behind, he left the saloon, crossed the clearing and entered the ship. As soon as they were inside, Joe dropped his murderous silence and cried: "What kind of a dirty trick was that, giving me poison instead of that snake oil?" "That was not poison," Harvey contradicted quietly. "It was La-anago Yergis extract, plus." "Plus what—arsenic?" "Now, Joseph! Consider my quandary when I came back here to manufacture our specific for all known ailments, with the intention of selling yonder asteroidal tin-horn a bill of medical goods—an entire case, mind you. Was I to mix the extract with the water for which we had been swindled to the tune of ten buckos a liter? Where would our profit have been, then? No; I had to use the bitter free water, of course." "But why use it on me?" Joe demanded furiously. Harvey looked reprovingly at his gangling partner. "Did Johnson ask to taste it, or did he not? One must look ahead, Joseph. I had to produce the same medicine that we will now manufacture. Thus, you were a guinea pig for a splendid cause." "Okay, okay," Joe said. "But you shoulda charged him more." "Joseph, I promise you that we shall get back every redsent of which that swindler cheated us, besides whatever other funds or valuables he possesses. We could not be content with less." "Well, we're starting all right," admitted Joe. "How about that thing with six arms? He looks like a valuable. Can't we grab him off?" Harvey stopped filling bottles and looked up pensively. "I have every hope of luring away the profitable monstrosity. Apparently you have also surmised the fortune we could make with him. At first I purpose to exhibit him on our interplanetary tours with our streamlined panacea; he would be a spectacular attraction for bucolic suckers. Later, a brief period of demonstrating his abilities on the audio-visiphone. Then our triumph—we shall sell him at a stupendous figure to the zoo!" Joe was still dazed by that monetary vista when he and Harvey carried the case of medicine to the saloon. The mayor had already cleared a place of honor in the cluttered back room, where he told them to put it down carefully. Then he took the elaborate bottle-opener Harvey gave him, reverently uncorked a bottle and sampled it. It must have been at least as good as the first; he gagged. "That's the stuff, all right," he said, swallowing hard. He counted out the money into Harvey's hand, at a moderate rate that precariously balanced between his pleasure at getting the fever remedy and his pain at paying for it. Then he glanced out to see the position of Jupiter, and asked: "You gents eaten yet? The restaurant's open now." Harvey and Joe looked at each other. They hadn't been thinking about food at all, but suddenly they realized that they were hungry. "It's only water we were short of," Harvey said apprehensively. "We've got rations back at the ship." " H-mph! " the mayor grunted. "Powdered concentrates. Compressed pap. Suit yourselves. We treat our stomachs better here. And you're welcome to our hospitality." "Your hospitality," said Harvey, "depends on the prices you charge." "Well, if that's what's worrying you, you can stop worrying," answered the mayor promptly. "What's more, the kind of dinner I serve here you can't get anywhere else for any price." Swiftly, Harvey conned the possibilities of being bilked again. He saw none. "Let's take a look at the menu, anyhow, Joe," he said guardedly. Johnson immediately fell into the role of "mine host." "Come right in, gents," he invited. "Right into the dining room." He seated them at a table, which a rope tied between posts made more or less private, though nobody else was in the saloon and there was little chance of company. Genius, the six-armed native, appeared from the dingy kitchen with two menus in one hand, two glasses of water in another, plus napkins, silverware, a pitcher, plates, saucers, cups, and their cocktails, which were on the house. Then he stood by for orders. Harvey and Joe studied the menu critically. The prices were phenomenally low. When they glanced up at Johnson in perplexity, he grinned, bowed and asked: "Everything satisfactory, gents?" "Quite," said Harvey. "We shall order." For an hour they were served amazing dishes, both fresh and canned, the culinary wealth of this planetoid and all the system. And the service was as extraordinary as the meal itself. With four hands, Genius played deftly upon a pair of mellow Venusian viotars , using his other two hands for waiting on the table. "We absolutely must purchase this incredible specimen," Harvey whispered excitedly when Johnson and the native were both in the kitchen, attending to the next course. "He would make any society hostess's season a riotous success, which should be worth a great sum to women like Mrs. van Schuyler-Morgan, merely for his hire." "Think of a fast one fast," Joe agreed. "You're right." "But I dislike having to revise my opinion of a man so often," complained Harvey. "I wish Johnson would stay either swindler or honest merchant. This dinner is worth as least twenty buckos, yet I estimate our check at a mere bucko twenty redsents." The mayor's appearance prevented them from continuing the discussion. "It's been a great honor, gents," he said. "Ain't often I have visitors, and I like the best, like you two gents." As if on cue, Genius came out and put the check down between Joe and Harvey. Harvey picked it up negligently, but his casual air vanished in a yelp of horror. "What the devil is this?" he shouted.—"How do you arrive at this fantastic, idiotic figure— three hundred and twenty-eight buckos !" Johnson didn't answer. Neither did Genius; he simply put on the table, not a fingerbowl, but a magnifying glass. With one of his thirty fingers he pointed politely to the bottom of the menu. Harvey focused on the microscopic print, and his face went pasty with rage. The minute note read: "Services and entertainment, 327 buckos 80 redsents." "You can go to hell!" Joe growled. "We won't pay it!" Johnson sighed ponderously. "I was afraid you'd act like that," he said with regret. He pulled a tin badge out of his rear pocket, pinned it on his vest, and twisted his holstered gun into view. "Afraid I'll have to ask the sheriff to take over." Johnson, the "sheriff," collected the money, and Johnson, the "restaurateur," pocketed it. Meanwhile, Harvey tipped Joe the sign to remain calm. "My friend," he said to the mayor, and his tones took on a schoolmasterish severity, "your long absence from Earth has perhaps made you forget those elements of human wisdom that have entered the folk-lore of your native planet. Such as, for example: 'It is folly to kill a goose that lays golden eggs,' and 'Penny wise is pound foolish.'" "I don't get the connection," objected Johnson. "Well, by obliging us to pay such a high price for your dinner, you put out of your reach the chance of profiting from a really substantial deal. My partner and I were prepared to make you a sizable offer for the peculiar creature you call Genius. But by reducing our funds the way you have—" "Who said I wanted to sell him?" the mayor interrupted. He rubbed his fingers together and asked disinterestedly: "What were you going to offer, anyhow?" "It doesn't matter any longer," Harvey said with elaborate carelessness. "Perhaps you wouldn't have accepted it, anyway." "That's right," Johnson came back emphatically. "But what would your offer have been which I would have turned down?" "Which one? The one we were going to make, or the one we can make now?" "Either one. It don't make no difference. Genius is too valuable to sell." "Oh, come now, Mr. Johnson. Don't tell me no amount of money would tempt you!" "Nope. But how much did you say?" "Ah, then you will consider releasing Genius!" "Well, I'll tell you something," said the mayor confidentially. "When you've got one thing, you've got one thing. But when you've got money, it's the same as having a lot of things. Because, if you've got money, you can buy this and that and this and that and—" "This and that," concluded Joe. "We'll give you five hundred buckos." "Now, gents!" Johnson remonstrated. "Why, six hundred would hardly—" "You haven't left us much money," Harvey put in. The mayor frowned. "All right, we'll split the difference. Make it five-fifty." Harvey was quick to pay out, for this was a genuine windfall. Then he stood up and admired the astonishing possession he had so inexpensively acquired. "I really hate to deprive you of this unique creature," he said to Johnson. "I should imagine you will be rather lonely, with only your filial mammoth to keep you company." "I sure will," Johnson confessed glumly. "I got pretty attached to Genius, and I'm going to miss him something awful." Harvey forcibly removed his eyes from the native, who was clearing off the table almost all at once. "My friend," he said, "we take your only solace, it is true, but in his place we can offer something no less amazing and instructive." The mayor's hand went protectively to his pocket. "What is it?" he asked with the suspicion of a man who has seen human nature at its worst and expects nothing better. "Joseph, get our most prized belonging from the communications room of the ship," Harvey instructed. To Johnson he explained: "You must see the wondrous instrument before its value can be appreciated. My partner will soon have it here for your astonishment." Joe's face grew as glum as Johnson's had been. "Aw, Harv," he protested, "do we have to sell it? And right when I thought we were getting the key!" "We must not be selfish, my boy," Harvey said nobly. "We have had our chance; now we must relinquish Fate to the hands of a man who might have more success than we. Go, Joseph. Bring it here." Unwillingly, Joe turned and shuffled out. On a larger and heavier world than Planetoid 42, Johnson's curiosity would probably have had weight and mass. He was bursting with questions, but he was obviously afraid they would cost him money. For his part, Harvey allowed that curiosity to grow like a Venusian amoeba until Joe came in, lugging a radio. "Is that what you were talking about?" the mayor snorted. "What makes you think I want a radio? I came here to get away from singers and political speech-makers." "Do not jump to hasty conclusions," Harvey cautioned. "Another word, and I shall refuse you the greatest opportunity any man has ever had, with the sole exceptions of Joseph, myself and the unfortunate inventor of this absolutely awe-inspiring device." "I ain't in the market for a radio," Johnson said stubbornly. Harvey nodded in relief. "We have attempted to repay our host, Joseph. He has spurned our generosity. We have now the chance to continue our study, which I am positive will soon reward us with the key to an enormous fortune." "Well, that's no plating off our bow," Joe grunted. "I'm glad he did turn it down. I hated to give it up after working on it for three whole years." He picked up the radio and began walking toward the door. "Now, hold on!" the mayor cried. "I ain't saying I'll buy, but what is it I'm turning down?" Joe returned and set the instrument down on the bar. His face sorrowful, Harvey fondly stroked the scarred plasticoid cabinet. "To make a long story, Mr. Johnson," he said, "Joseph and I were among the chosen few who knew the famous Doctor Dean intimately. Just before his tragic death, you will recall, Dean allegedly went insane." He banged his fist on the bar. "I have said it before, and I repeat again, that was a malicious lie, spread by the doctor's enemies to discredit his greatest invention—this fourth dimensional radio!" "This what?" Johnson blurted out. "In simple terms," clarified Harvey, "the ingenious doctor discovered that the yawning chasm between the dimensions could be bridged by energy of all quanta. There has never been any question that the inhabitants of the super-dimension would be far more civilized than ourselves. Consequently, the man who could tap their knowledge would find himself in possession of a powerful, undreamt-of science!" The mayor looked respectfully at the silent box on the bar. "And this thing gets broadcasts from the fourth dimension?" "It does, Mr. Johnson! Only charlatans like those who envied Doctor Dean's magnificent accomplishments could deny that fact." The mayor put his hands in his pockets, unswiveled one hip and stared thoughtfully at the battered cabinet. "Well, let's say it picks up fourth dimensional broadcasts," he conceded. "But how could you understand what they're saying? Folks up there wouldn't talk our language." Again Harvey smashed his fist down. "Do you dare to repeat the scurvy lie that broke Dean's spirit and drove him to suicide?" Johnson recoiled. "No—no, of course not . I mean, being up here, I naturally couldn't get all the details." "Naturally," Harvey agreed, mollified. "I'm sorry I lost my temper. But it is a matter of record that the doctor proved the broadcasts emanating from the super-dimension were in English! Why should that be so difficult to believe? Is it impossible that at one time there was communication between the dimensions, that the super-beings admired our language and adopted it in all its beauty, adding to it their own hyper-scientific trimmings?" "Why, I don't know," Johnson said in confusion. "For three years, Joseph and I lost sleep and hair, trying to detect the simple key that would translate the somewhat metamorphosed broadcasts into our primitive English. It eluded us. Even the doctor failed. But that was understandable; a sensitive soul like his could stand only so much. And the combination of ridicule and failure to solve the mystery caused him to take his own life." Johnson winced. "Is that what you want to unload on me?" "For a very good reason, sir. Patience is the virtue that will be rewarded with the key to these fourth dimensional broadcasts. A man who could devote his life to improving this lonely worldlet is obviously a person with unusual patience." "Yeah," the mayor said grudgingly, "I ain't exactly flighty." "Therefore, you are the man who could unravel the problem!" Johnson asked skeptically: "How about a sample first?" Harvey turned a knob on the face of the scarred radio. After several squeals of spatial figures, a smooth voice began: "There are omnious pleajes of moby-hailegs in sonmirand which, howgraismon, are notch to be donfured miss ellasellabell in either or both hagasanipaj, by all means. This does not refly, on the brother man, nat or mizzafil saces are denuded by this ossifaligo...." Harvey switched off the set determinedly. "Wait a minute!" Johnson begged. "I almost got it then!" "I dislike being commercial," said Harvey, "but this astounding device still belongs to us. Would we not be foolish to let you discover the clue before purchasing the right to do so?" The mayor nodded indecisively, looking at the radio with agonized longing. "How much do you want?" he asked unhappily. "One thousand buckos, and no haggling. I am not in the mood." Johnson opened his mouth to argue; then, seeing Harvey's set features, paid with the worst possible grace. "Don't you think we ought to tell him about the batteries, Harv?" Joe asked. "What about the batteries?" demanded Johnson with deadly calm. "A very small matter," Harvey said airily. "You see, we have been analyzing these broadcasts for three years. In that time, of course, the batteries are bound to weaken. I estimate these should last not less than one Terrestrial month, at the very least." "What do I do then?" Harvey shrugged. "Special batteries are required, which I see Joseph has by chance brought along. For the batteries, the only ones of their kind left in the system, I ask only what they cost—one hundred and ninety-nine buckos, no more and, on the other hand, no less." Johnson was breathing hard, and his hand hovered dangerously near his gun. But he paid the amount Harvey wanted. Moreover, he actually shook hands when the two panacea purveyors collected their six-armed prize and said goodbye. Before they were outside, however, he had turned on the radio and was listening tensely to a woman's highly cultured, though rather angry voice, saying: "Oh, you hannaforge are all beasa-taga-sanimort. If you rue amount it, how do you respench a pure woman to ansver go-samak—" "I'll get it!" they heard Johnson mutter. Then the sound of giant feet crossing the barroom floor reached their ears, and a shrill question: "What's that, Papa?" "A fortune, Jed! Those fakers are damned fools, selling us a thing like—" Joe gazed at Harvey admiringly. "Another one sold? Harv, that spiel pulls them in like an ether storm!" Together with the remarkable planetoid man, they reached the ship. Above them, dark, tumbling shapes blotted out the stars and silently moved on. Joe opened the gangway door. "Come on in, pal," he said to Genius. "We're shoving off." The planetoid man grinned foolishly. "Can't go arong with you," he said with an apologetic manner. "I rike to, but pressure fratten me out if I go." "What in solar blazes are you talking about?" Harvey asked. "I grow up on pranetoid," Genius explained. "On big pranet, too much pressure for me." The two salesmen looked narrowly at each other. "Did Johnson know that when he sold you?" Joe snarled. "Oh, sure." The silly grin became wider than ever. "Peopre from Earth buy me rots of times. I never reave pranetoid, though." "Joseph," Harvey said ominously, "that slick colonist has put one over upon us. What is our customary procedure in that event?" "We tear him apart," Joe replied between his teeth. "Not Mister Johnson," advised Genius. "Have gun and badge. He shoot you first and then rock you up in prison." Harvey paused, his ominous air vanishing. "True. There is also the fact, Joseph, that when he discovers the scrambled rectifier in the radio we sold him, he will have been paid back in full for his regrettable dishonesty." Unwillingly, Joe agreed. While Genius retreated to a safe distance, they entered the ship and blasted off. Within a few minutes the automatic steering pilot had maneuvered them above the plane of the asteroid belt. "I got kind of dizzy," Joe said, "there were so many deals back and forth. How much did we make on the sucker?" "A goodly amount, I wager," Harvey responded. He took out a pencil and paper. "Medicine, 469.50; radio, 1,000; batteries, 199. Total—let's see—1668 buckos and 50 redsents. A goodly sum, as I told you." He emptied his pockets of money, spread it out on the astrogation table and began counting. Finished, he looked up, troubled. "How much did we have when we landed, Joseph?" "Exactly 1668 buckos," Joe answered promptly. "I can't understand it," said Harvey. "Instead of double our capital, we now have only 1668 buckos and 50 redsents!" Feverishly, he returned to his pencil and paper. "Drinking water, 790; battery water, free; meal, 328; planetoid man, 550. Total: 1668 buckos!" He stared at the figures. "We paid out almost as much as we took in," he said bitterly. "Despite our intensive efforts, we made the absurd sum of fifty redsents." "Why, the dirty crook!" Joe growled. But after a few moments of sad reflection, Harvey became philosophical. "Perhaps, Joseph, we are more fortunate than we realize. We were, after all, completely in Johnson's power. The more I ponder, the more I believe we were lucky to escape. And, anyhow, we did make fifty redsents on the swindler. A moral victory, my boy." Joe, who had been sunk desparingly into a chair, now stood up slowly and asked: "Remember that bottle-opener we gave him?" "Certainly," Harvey explained. "What about it?" "How much did it cost us?" Harvey's eyebrows puckered. Suddenly he started laughing. "You're right, Joseph. We paid forty-six redsents for it on Venus. So, after all that transacting of business, we made four redsents!" "Four redsents, hell!" Joe snapped. "That was the sales tax!" He glared; then a smile lifted his mouth. "You remember those yokels on Mars' Flatlands, and the way they worshipped gold?" " Goldbricks! " Harvey said succinctly. Grinning, Joe set the robot-controls for Mars.

Describe the setting of the story.

5

The story is set on Planetoid 42. It is a small and extremely sparsely populated asteroid. It has nearly no infrastructure. Most of the narrative takes place in the spaceport/saloon/restaurant operated by Johnson. The world is technologically simple and has very few resources. The story takes place in an unspecified future where space travel is commonplace and alien races have been discovered. Joe and Harvey remark that they have traveled from planet to planet and seen numerous strange life forms.

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Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net GRIFTERS' ASTEROID By H. L. GOLD Harvey and Joe were the slickest con-men ever to gyp a space-lane sucker. Or so they thought! Angus Johnson knew differently. He charged them five buckos for a glass of water—and got it! [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories May 1943. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Characteristically, Harvey Ellsworth tried to maintain his dignity, though his parched tongue was almost hanging out. But Joe Mallon, with no dignity to maintain, lurched across the rubbish-strewn patch of land that had been termed a spaceport. When Harvey staggered pontifically into the battered metalloy saloon—the only one on Planetoid 42—his tall, gangling partner was already stumbling out, mouthing something incoherent. They met in the doorway, violently. "We're delirious!" Joe cried. "It's a mirage!" "What is?" asked Harvey through a mouthful of cotton. Joe reeled aside, and Harvey saw what had upset his partner. He stared, speechless for once. In their hectic voyages from planet to planet, the pair of panacea purveyors had encountered the usual strange life-forms. But never had they seen anything like the amazing creature in that colonial saloon. Paying no attention to them, it was carrying a case of liquor in two hands, six siphons in two others, and a broom and dustpan in the remaining pair. The bartender, a big man resembling the plumpish Harvey in build, was leaning negligently on the counter, ordering this impossible being to fill the partly-emptied bottles, squeeze fruit juice and sweep the floor, all of which the native did simultaneously. "Nonsense," Harvey croaked uncertainly. "We have seen enough queer things to know there are always more." He led the way inside. Through thirst-cracked lips he rasped: "Water—quick!" Without a word, the bartender reached under the counter, brought out two glasses of water. The interplanetary con-men drank noisily, asked for more, until they had drunk eight glasses. Meanwhile, the bartender had taken out eight jiggers and filled them with whiskey. Harvey and Joe were breathing hard from having gulped the water so fast, but they were beginning to revive. They noticed the bartender's impersonal eyes studying them shrewdly. "Strangers, eh?" he asked at last. "Solar salesmen, my colonial friend," Harvey answered in his usual lush manner. "We purvey that renowned Martian remedy, La-anago Yergis , the formula for which was recently discovered by ourselves in the ancient ruined city of La-anago. Medical science is unanimous in proclaiming this magic medicine the sole panacea in the entire history of therapeutics." "Yeah?" said the bartender disinterestedly, polishing the chaser glasses without washing them. "Where you heading?" "Out of Mars for Ganymede. Our condenser broke down, and we've gone without water for five ghastly days." "Got a mechanic around this dumping ground you call a port?" Joe asked. "We did. He came near starving and moved on to Titan. Ships don't land here unless they're in trouble." "Then where's the water lead-in? We'll fill up and push off." "Mayor takes care of that," replied the saloon owner. "If you gents're finished at the bar, your drinks'll be forty buckos." Harvey grinned puzzledly. "We didn't take any whiskey." "Might as well. Water's five buckos a glass. Liquor's free with every chaser." Harvey's eyes bulged. Joe gulped. "That—that's robbery!" the lanky man managed to get out in a thin quaver. The barkeeper shrugged. "When there ain't many customers, you gotta make more on each one. Besides—" "Besides nothing!" Joe roared, finding his voice again. "You dirty crook—robbing poor spacemen! You—" "You dirty crook!" Joe roared. "Robbing honest spacemen!" Harvey nudged him warningly. "Easy, my boy, easy." He turned to the bartender apologetically. "Don't mind my friend. His adrenal glands are sometimes overactive. You were going to say—?" The round face of the barkeeper had assumed an aggrieved expression. "Folks are always thinkin' the other feller's out to do 'em," he said, shaking his head. "Lemme explain about the water here. It's bitter as some kinds of sin before it's purified. Have to bring it in with buckets and make it sweet. That takes time and labor. Waddya think—I was chargin' feller critters for water just out of devilment? I charge because I gotta." "Friend," said Harvey, taking out a wallet and counting off eight five-bucko bills, "here is your money. What's fair is fair, and you have put a different complexion on what seemed at first to be an unconscionable interjection of a middleman between Nature and man's thirst." The saloon man removed his dirty apron and came around the bar. "If that's an apology, I accept it. Now the mayor'll discuss filling your tanks. That's me. I'm also justice of the peace, official recorder, fire chief...." "And chief of police, no doubt," said Harvey jocosely. "Nope. That's my son, Jed. Angus Johnson's my name. Folks here just call me Chief. I run this town, and run it right. How much water will you need?" Joe estimated quickly. "About seventy-five liters, if we go on half rations," he answered. He waited apprehensively. "Let's say ten buckos a liter," the mayor said. "On account of the quantity, I'm able to quote a bargain price. Shucks, boys, it hurts me more to charge for water than it does for you to pay. I just got to, that's all." The mayor gestured to the native, who shuffled out to the tanks with them. The planetoid man worked the pump while the mayor intently watched the crude level-gauge, crying "Stop!" when it registered the proper amount. Then Johnson rubbed his thumb on his index finger and wetted his lips expectantly. Harvey bravely counted off the bills. He asked: "But what are we to do about replenishing our battery fluid? Ten buckos a liter would be preposterous. We simply can't afford it." Johnson's response almost floored them. "Who said anything about charging you for battery water? You can have all you want for nothing. It's just the purified stuff that comes so high." After giving them directions that would take them to the free-water pool, the ponderous factotum of Planetoid 42 shook hands and headed back to the saloon. His six-armed assistant followed him inside. "Now do you see, my hot-tempered colleague?" said Harvey as he and Joe picked up buckets that hung on the tank. "Johnson, as I saw instantly, is the victim of a difficult environment, and must charge accordingly." "Just the same," Joe griped, "paying for water isn't something you can get used to in ten minutes." In the fragile forest, they soon came across a stream that sprang from the igneous soil and splashed into the small pond whose contents, according to the mayor, was theirs for the asking. They filled their buckets and hauled them to the ship, then returned for more. It was on the sixth trip that Joe caught a glimpse of Jupiter-shine on a bright surface off to the left. The figure, 750, with the bucko sign in front of it, was still doing acrobatics inside his skull and keeping a faint suspicion alive in him. So he called Harvey and they went to investigate. Among the skimpy ground-crawling vines, they saw a long slender mound that was unmistakably a buried pipe. "What's this doing here?" Harvey asked, puzzled. "I thought Johnson had to transport water in pails." "Wonder where it leads to," Joe said uneasily. "It leads to the saloon," said Harvey, his eyes rapidly tracing the pipe back toward the spaceport. "What I am concerned with is where it leads from ." Five minutes later, panting heavily from the unaccustomed exertion of scrambling through the tangle of planetorial undergrowth, they burst into the open—before a clear, sparkling pool. Mutely, Harvey pointed out a pipe-end jutting under the water. "I am growing suspicious," he said in a rigidly controlled voice. But Joe was already on his knees, scooping up a handful of water and tasting it. "Sweet!" he snarled. They rushed back to the first pool, where Joe again tasted a sample. His mouth went wry. "Bitter! He uses only one pool, the sweet one! The only thing that needs purifying around here is that blasted mayor's conscience." "The asteroidal Poobah has tricked us with a slick come-on," said Harvey slowly. His eyes grew cold. "Joseph, the good-natured artist in me has become a hard and merciless avenger. I shall not rest until we have had the best of this colonial con-man! Watch your cues from this point hence." Fists clenched, the two returned to the saloon. But at the door they stopped and their fists unclenched. "Thought you gents were leaving," the mayor called out, seeing them frozen in the doorway. "Glad you didn't. Now you can meet my son, Jed. Him and me are the whole Earthman population of Johnson City." "You don't need any more," said Harvey, dismayed. Johnson's eight-foot son, topped by a massive roof of sun-bleached hair and held up by a foundation that seemed immovable, had obviously been born and raised in low gravity. For any decent-sized world would have kept him down near the general dimensions of a man. He held out an acre of palm. Harvey studied it worriedly, put his own hand somewhere on it, swallowed as it closed, then breathed again when his fingers were released in five units instead of a single compressed one. "Pleased to meet you," piped a voice that had never known a dense atmosphere. The pursuit of vengeance, Harvey realized, had taken a quick and unpleasant turn. Something shrewd was called for.... "Joseph!" he exclaimed, looking at his partner in alarm. "Don't you feel well?" Even before the others could turn to him, Joe's practiced eyes were gently crossing. He sagged against the door frame, all his features drooping like a bloodhound's. "Bring him in here!" Johnson cried. "I mean, get him away! He's coming down with asteroid fever!" "Of course," replied Harvey calmly. "Any fool knows the first symptoms of the disease that once scourged the universe." "What do you mean, once ?" demanded Johnson. "I come down with it every year, and I ain't hankering to have it in an off-season. Get him out of here!" "In good time. He can't be moved immediately." "Then he'll be here for months!" Harvey helped Joe to the counter and lifted him up on it. The mayor and his gigantic offspring were cowering across the room, trying to breathe in tiny, uncontaminating gasps. "You'll find everything you want in the back room," Johnson said frantically, "sulfopyridine, mustard plasters, rubs, inhalers, suction cups—" "Relics of the past," Harvey stated. "One medication is all modern man requires to combat the dread menace, asteroid fever." "What's that?" asked the mayor without conviction. Instead of replying, Harvey hurried outside to the ungainly second-hand rocket ship in the center of the shabby spaceport. He returned within a few minutes, carrying a bottle. Joe was still stretched out on the bar, panting, his eyes slowly crossing and uncrossing. Harvey lifted the patient's head tenderly, put the bottle to his lips and tilted it until he was forced to drink. When Joe tried to pull away, Harvey was inexorable. He made his partner drink until most of the liquid was gone. Then he stepped back and waited for the inevitable result. Joe's performance was better than ever. He lay supine for several moments, his face twisted into an expression that seemed doomed to perpetual wryness. Slowly, however, he sat up and his features straightened out. "Are—are you all right?" asked the mayor anxiously. "Much better," said Joe in a weak voice. "Maybe you need another dose," Harvey suggested. Joe recoiled. "I'm fine now!" he cried, and sprang off the bar to prove it. Astonished, Johnson and his son drew closer. They searched Joe's face, and then the mayor timidly felt his pulse. "Well, I'll be hanged!" Johnson ejaculated. " La-anago Yergis never fails, my friend," Harvey explained. "By actual test, it conquers asteroid fever in from four to twenty-three minutes, depending on the severity of the attack. Luckily, we caught this one before it grew formidable." The mayor's eyes became clouded mirrors of an inward conflict. "If you don't charge too much," he said warily, "I might think of buying some." "We do not sell this unbelievable remedy," Harvey replied with dignity. "It sells itself." "'Course, I'd expect a considerable reduction if I bought a whole case," said Johnson. "That would be the smallest investment you could make, compared with the vast loss of time and strength the fever involves." "How much?" asked the mayor unhappily. "For you, since you have taken us in so hospitably, a mere five hundred buckos." Johnson did not actually stagger back, but he gave the impression of doing so. "F-four hundred," he offered. "Not a red cent less than four seventy-five," Harvey said flatly. "Make it four fifty," quavered Johnson. "I dislike haggling," said Harvey. The final price, however, was four hundred and sixty-nine buckos and fifty redsents. Magnanimously, Harvey added: "And we will include, gratis , an elegant bottle-opener, a superb product of Mercurian handicraftsmanship." Johnson stabbed out a warning finger. "No tricks now. I want a taste of that stuff. You're not switching some worthless junk on me." Harvey took a glass from the bar and poured him a generous sample. The mayor sniffed it, grimaced, then threw it down his gullet. The ensuing minute saw a grim battle between a man and his stomach, a battle which the man gradually won. "There ain't no words for that taste," he gulped when it was safe to talk again. "Medicine," Harvey propounded, "should taste like medicine." To Joe he said: "Come, my esteemed colleague. We must perform the sacred task to which we have dedicated ourselves." With Joe stumbling along behind, he left the saloon, crossed the clearing and entered the ship. As soon as they were inside, Joe dropped his murderous silence and cried: "What kind of a dirty trick was that, giving me poison instead of that snake oil?" "That was not poison," Harvey contradicted quietly. "It was La-anago Yergis extract, plus." "Plus what—arsenic?" "Now, Joseph! Consider my quandary when I came back here to manufacture our specific for all known ailments, with the intention of selling yonder asteroidal tin-horn a bill of medical goods—an entire case, mind you. Was I to mix the extract with the water for which we had been swindled to the tune of ten buckos a liter? Where would our profit have been, then? No; I had to use the bitter free water, of course." "But why use it on me?" Joe demanded furiously. Harvey looked reprovingly at his gangling partner. "Did Johnson ask to taste it, or did he not? One must look ahead, Joseph. I had to produce the same medicine that we will now manufacture. Thus, you were a guinea pig for a splendid cause." "Okay, okay," Joe said. "But you shoulda charged him more." "Joseph, I promise you that we shall get back every redsent of which that swindler cheated us, besides whatever other funds or valuables he possesses. We could not be content with less." "Well, we're starting all right," admitted Joe. "How about that thing with six arms? He looks like a valuable. Can't we grab him off?" Harvey stopped filling bottles and looked up pensively. "I have every hope of luring away the profitable monstrosity. Apparently you have also surmised the fortune we could make with him. At first I purpose to exhibit him on our interplanetary tours with our streamlined panacea; he would be a spectacular attraction for bucolic suckers. Later, a brief period of demonstrating his abilities on the audio-visiphone. Then our triumph—we shall sell him at a stupendous figure to the zoo!" Joe was still dazed by that monetary vista when he and Harvey carried the case of medicine to the saloon. The mayor had already cleared a place of honor in the cluttered back room, where he told them to put it down carefully. Then he took the elaborate bottle-opener Harvey gave him, reverently uncorked a bottle and sampled it. It must have been at least as good as the first; he gagged. "That's the stuff, all right," he said, swallowing hard. He counted out the money into Harvey's hand, at a moderate rate that precariously balanced between his pleasure at getting the fever remedy and his pain at paying for it. Then he glanced out to see the position of Jupiter, and asked: "You gents eaten yet? The restaurant's open now." Harvey and Joe looked at each other. They hadn't been thinking about food at all, but suddenly they realized that they were hungry. "It's only water we were short of," Harvey said apprehensively. "We've got rations back at the ship." " H-mph! " the mayor grunted. "Powdered concentrates. Compressed pap. Suit yourselves. We treat our stomachs better here. And you're welcome to our hospitality." "Your hospitality," said Harvey, "depends on the prices you charge." "Well, if that's what's worrying you, you can stop worrying," answered the mayor promptly. "What's more, the kind of dinner I serve here you can't get anywhere else for any price." Swiftly, Harvey conned the possibilities of being bilked again. He saw none. "Let's take a look at the menu, anyhow, Joe," he said guardedly. Johnson immediately fell into the role of "mine host." "Come right in, gents," he invited. "Right into the dining room." He seated them at a table, which a rope tied between posts made more or less private, though nobody else was in the saloon and there was little chance of company. Genius, the six-armed native, appeared from the dingy kitchen with two menus in one hand, two glasses of water in another, plus napkins, silverware, a pitcher, plates, saucers, cups, and their cocktails, which were on the house. Then he stood by for orders. Harvey and Joe studied the menu critically. The prices were phenomenally low. When they glanced up at Johnson in perplexity, he grinned, bowed and asked: "Everything satisfactory, gents?" "Quite," said Harvey. "We shall order." For an hour they were served amazing dishes, both fresh and canned, the culinary wealth of this planetoid and all the system. And the service was as extraordinary as the meal itself. With four hands, Genius played deftly upon a pair of mellow Venusian viotars , using his other two hands for waiting on the table. "We absolutely must purchase this incredible specimen," Harvey whispered excitedly when Johnson and the native were both in the kitchen, attending to the next course. "He would make any society hostess's season a riotous success, which should be worth a great sum to women like Mrs. van Schuyler-Morgan, merely for his hire." "Think of a fast one fast," Joe agreed. "You're right." "But I dislike having to revise my opinion of a man so often," complained Harvey. "I wish Johnson would stay either swindler or honest merchant. This dinner is worth as least twenty buckos, yet I estimate our check at a mere bucko twenty redsents." The mayor's appearance prevented them from continuing the discussion. "It's been a great honor, gents," he said. "Ain't often I have visitors, and I like the best, like you two gents." As if on cue, Genius came out and put the check down between Joe and Harvey. Harvey picked it up negligently, but his casual air vanished in a yelp of horror. "What the devil is this?" he shouted.—"How do you arrive at this fantastic, idiotic figure— three hundred and twenty-eight buckos !" Johnson didn't answer. Neither did Genius; he simply put on the table, not a fingerbowl, but a magnifying glass. With one of his thirty fingers he pointed politely to the bottom of the menu. Harvey focused on the microscopic print, and his face went pasty with rage. The minute note read: "Services and entertainment, 327 buckos 80 redsents." "You can go to hell!" Joe growled. "We won't pay it!" Johnson sighed ponderously. "I was afraid you'd act like that," he said with regret. He pulled a tin badge out of his rear pocket, pinned it on his vest, and twisted his holstered gun into view. "Afraid I'll have to ask the sheriff to take over." Johnson, the "sheriff," collected the money, and Johnson, the "restaurateur," pocketed it. Meanwhile, Harvey tipped Joe the sign to remain calm. "My friend," he said to the mayor, and his tones took on a schoolmasterish severity, "your long absence from Earth has perhaps made you forget those elements of human wisdom that have entered the folk-lore of your native planet. Such as, for example: 'It is folly to kill a goose that lays golden eggs,' and 'Penny wise is pound foolish.'" "I don't get the connection," objected Johnson. "Well, by obliging us to pay such a high price for your dinner, you put out of your reach the chance of profiting from a really substantial deal. My partner and I were prepared to make you a sizable offer for the peculiar creature you call Genius. But by reducing our funds the way you have—" "Who said I wanted to sell him?" the mayor interrupted. He rubbed his fingers together and asked disinterestedly: "What were you going to offer, anyhow?" "It doesn't matter any longer," Harvey said with elaborate carelessness. "Perhaps you wouldn't have accepted it, anyway." "That's right," Johnson came back emphatically. "But what would your offer have been which I would have turned down?" "Which one? The one we were going to make, or the one we can make now?" "Either one. It don't make no difference. Genius is too valuable to sell." "Oh, come now, Mr. Johnson. Don't tell me no amount of money would tempt you!" "Nope. But how much did you say?" "Ah, then you will consider releasing Genius!" "Well, I'll tell you something," said the mayor confidentially. "When you've got one thing, you've got one thing. But when you've got money, it's the same as having a lot of things. Because, if you've got money, you can buy this and that and this and that and—" "This and that," concluded Joe. "We'll give you five hundred buckos." "Now, gents!" Johnson remonstrated. "Why, six hundred would hardly—" "You haven't left us much money," Harvey put in. The mayor frowned. "All right, we'll split the difference. Make it five-fifty." Harvey was quick to pay out, for this was a genuine windfall. Then he stood up and admired the astonishing possession he had so inexpensively acquired. "I really hate to deprive you of this unique creature," he said to Johnson. "I should imagine you will be rather lonely, with only your filial mammoth to keep you company." "I sure will," Johnson confessed glumly. "I got pretty attached to Genius, and I'm going to miss him something awful." Harvey forcibly removed his eyes from the native, who was clearing off the table almost all at once. "My friend," he said, "we take your only solace, it is true, but in his place we can offer something no less amazing and instructive." The mayor's hand went protectively to his pocket. "What is it?" he asked with the suspicion of a man who has seen human nature at its worst and expects nothing better. "Joseph, get our most prized belonging from the communications room of the ship," Harvey instructed. To Johnson he explained: "You must see the wondrous instrument before its value can be appreciated. My partner will soon have it here for your astonishment." Joe's face grew as glum as Johnson's had been. "Aw, Harv," he protested, "do we have to sell it? And right when I thought we were getting the key!" "We must not be selfish, my boy," Harvey said nobly. "We have had our chance; now we must relinquish Fate to the hands of a man who might have more success than we. Go, Joseph. Bring it here." Unwillingly, Joe turned and shuffled out. On a larger and heavier world than Planetoid 42, Johnson's curiosity would probably have had weight and mass. He was bursting with questions, but he was obviously afraid they would cost him money. For his part, Harvey allowed that curiosity to grow like a Venusian amoeba until Joe came in, lugging a radio. "Is that what you were talking about?" the mayor snorted. "What makes you think I want a radio? I came here to get away from singers and political speech-makers." "Do not jump to hasty conclusions," Harvey cautioned. "Another word, and I shall refuse you the greatest opportunity any man has ever had, with the sole exceptions of Joseph, myself and the unfortunate inventor of this absolutely awe-inspiring device." "I ain't in the market for a radio," Johnson said stubbornly. Harvey nodded in relief. "We have attempted to repay our host, Joseph. He has spurned our generosity. We have now the chance to continue our study, which I am positive will soon reward us with the key to an enormous fortune." "Well, that's no plating off our bow," Joe grunted. "I'm glad he did turn it down. I hated to give it up after working on it for three whole years." He picked up the radio and began walking toward the door. "Now, hold on!" the mayor cried. "I ain't saying I'll buy, but what is it I'm turning down?" Joe returned and set the instrument down on the bar. His face sorrowful, Harvey fondly stroked the scarred plasticoid cabinet. "To make a long story, Mr. Johnson," he said, "Joseph and I were among the chosen few who knew the famous Doctor Dean intimately. Just before his tragic death, you will recall, Dean allegedly went insane." He banged his fist on the bar. "I have said it before, and I repeat again, that was a malicious lie, spread by the doctor's enemies to discredit his greatest invention—this fourth dimensional radio!" "This what?" Johnson blurted out. "In simple terms," clarified Harvey, "the ingenious doctor discovered that the yawning chasm between the dimensions could be bridged by energy of all quanta. There has never been any question that the inhabitants of the super-dimension would be far more civilized than ourselves. Consequently, the man who could tap their knowledge would find himself in possession of a powerful, undreamt-of science!" The mayor looked respectfully at the silent box on the bar. "And this thing gets broadcasts from the fourth dimension?" "It does, Mr. Johnson! Only charlatans like those who envied Doctor Dean's magnificent accomplishments could deny that fact." The mayor put his hands in his pockets, unswiveled one hip and stared thoughtfully at the battered cabinet. "Well, let's say it picks up fourth dimensional broadcasts," he conceded. "But how could you understand what they're saying? Folks up there wouldn't talk our language." Again Harvey smashed his fist down. "Do you dare to repeat the scurvy lie that broke Dean's spirit and drove him to suicide?" Johnson recoiled. "No—no, of course not . I mean, being up here, I naturally couldn't get all the details." "Naturally," Harvey agreed, mollified. "I'm sorry I lost my temper. But it is a matter of record that the doctor proved the broadcasts emanating from the super-dimension were in English! Why should that be so difficult to believe? Is it impossible that at one time there was communication between the dimensions, that the super-beings admired our language and adopted it in all its beauty, adding to it their own hyper-scientific trimmings?" "Why, I don't know," Johnson said in confusion. "For three years, Joseph and I lost sleep and hair, trying to detect the simple key that would translate the somewhat metamorphosed broadcasts into our primitive English. It eluded us. Even the doctor failed. But that was understandable; a sensitive soul like his could stand only so much. And the combination of ridicule and failure to solve the mystery caused him to take his own life." Johnson winced. "Is that what you want to unload on me?" "For a very good reason, sir. Patience is the virtue that will be rewarded with the key to these fourth dimensional broadcasts. A man who could devote his life to improving this lonely worldlet is obviously a person with unusual patience." "Yeah," the mayor said grudgingly, "I ain't exactly flighty." "Therefore, you are the man who could unravel the problem!" Johnson asked skeptically: "How about a sample first?" Harvey turned a knob on the face of the scarred radio. After several squeals of spatial figures, a smooth voice began: "There are omnious pleajes of moby-hailegs in sonmirand which, howgraismon, are notch to be donfured miss ellasellabell in either or both hagasanipaj, by all means. This does not refly, on the brother man, nat or mizzafil saces are denuded by this ossifaligo...." Harvey switched off the set determinedly. "Wait a minute!" Johnson begged. "I almost got it then!" "I dislike being commercial," said Harvey, "but this astounding device still belongs to us. Would we not be foolish to let you discover the clue before purchasing the right to do so?" The mayor nodded indecisively, looking at the radio with agonized longing. "How much do you want?" he asked unhappily. "One thousand buckos, and no haggling. I am not in the mood." Johnson opened his mouth to argue; then, seeing Harvey's set features, paid with the worst possible grace. "Don't you think we ought to tell him about the batteries, Harv?" Joe asked. "What about the batteries?" demanded Johnson with deadly calm. "A very small matter," Harvey said airily. "You see, we have been analyzing these broadcasts for three years. In that time, of course, the batteries are bound to weaken. I estimate these should last not less than one Terrestrial month, at the very least." "What do I do then?" Harvey shrugged. "Special batteries are required, which I see Joseph has by chance brought along. For the batteries, the only ones of their kind left in the system, I ask only what they cost—one hundred and ninety-nine buckos, no more and, on the other hand, no less." Johnson was breathing hard, and his hand hovered dangerously near his gun. But he paid the amount Harvey wanted. Moreover, he actually shook hands when the two panacea purveyors collected their six-armed prize and said goodbye. Before they were outside, however, he had turned on the radio and was listening tensely to a woman's highly cultured, though rather angry voice, saying: "Oh, you hannaforge are all beasa-taga-sanimort. If you rue amount it, how do you respench a pure woman to ansver go-samak—" "I'll get it!" they heard Johnson mutter. Then the sound of giant feet crossing the barroom floor reached their ears, and a shrill question: "What's that, Papa?" "A fortune, Jed! Those fakers are damned fools, selling us a thing like—" Joe gazed at Harvey admiringly. "Another one sold? Harv, that spiel pulls them in like an ether storm!" Together with the remarkable planetoid man, they reached the ship. Above them, dark, tumbling shapes blotted out the stars and silently moved on. Joe opened the gangway door. "Come on in, pal," he said to Genius. "We're shoving off." The planetoid man grinned foolishly. "Can't go arong with you," he said with an apologetic manner. "I rike to, but pressure fratten me out if I go." "What in solar blazes are you talking about?" Harvey asked. "I grow up on pranetoid," Genius explained. "On big pranet, too much pressure for me." The two salesmen looked narrowly at each other. "Did Johnson know that when he sold you?" Joe snarled. "Oh, sure." The silly grin became wider than ever. "Peopre from Earth buy me rots of times. I never reave pranetoid, though." "Joseph," Harvey said ominously, "that slick colonist has put one over upon us. What is our customary procedure in that event?" "We tear him apart," Joe replied between his teeth. "Not Mister Johnson," advised Genius. "Have gun and badge. He shoot you first and then rock you up in prison." Harvey paused, his ominous air vanishing. "True. There is also the fact, Joseph, that when he discovers the scrambled rectifier in the radio we sold him, he will have been paid back in full for his regrettable dishonesty." Unwillingly, Joe agreed. While Genius retreated to a safe distance, they entered the ship and blasted off. Within a few minutes the automatic steering pilot had maneuvered them above the plane of the asteroid belt. "I got kind of dizzy," Joe said, "there were so many deals back and forth. How much did we make on the sucker?" "A goodly amount, I wager," Harvey responded. He took out a pencil and paper. "Medicine, 469.50; radio, 1,000; batteries, 199. Total—let's see—1668 buckos and 50 redsents. A goodly sum, as I told you." He emptied his pockets of money, spread it out on the astrogation table and began counting. Finished, he looked up, troubled. "How much did we have when we landed, Joseph?" "Exactly 1668 buckos," Joe answered promptly. "I can't understand it," said Harvey. "Instead of double our capital, we now have only 1668 buckos and 50 redsents!" Feverishly, he returned to his pencil and paper. "Drinking water, 790; battery water, free; meal, 328; planetoid man, 550. Total: 1668 buckos!" He stared at the figures. "We paid out almost as much as we took in," he said bitterly. "Despite our intensive efforts, we made the absurd sum of fifty redsents." "Why, the dirty crook!" Joe growled. But after a few moments of sad reflection, Harvey became philosophical. "Perhaps, Joseph, we are more fortunate than we realize. We were, after all, completely in Johnson's power. The more I ponder, the more I believe we were lucky to escape. And, anyhow, we did make fifty redsents on the swindler. A moral victory, my boy." Joe, who had been sunk desparingly into a chair, now stood up slowly and asked: "Remember that bottle-opener we gave him?" "Certainly," Harvey explained. "What about it?" "How much did it cost us?" Harvey's eyebrows puckered. Suddenly he started laughing. "You're right, Joseph. We paid forty-six redsents for it on Venus. So, after all that transacting of business, we made four redsents!" "Four redsents, hell!" Joe snapped. "That was the sales tax!" He glared; then a smile lifted his mouth. "You remember those yokels on Mars' Flatlands, and the way they worshipped gold?" " Goldbricks! " Harvey said succinctly. Grinning, Joe set the robot-controls for Mars.

Describe the setting of the story.

6

Grifter’s Asteroid by H.L. Gold takes place on a small planetoid somewhere in the universe. Because of its small size, there are only two Earthmen on it, Johnson and his large son. There are the Native peoples as well, one of which is Genius, Johnson’s employee. This small planet does not have many resources to its name. Due to its small size and remote location, there are no radios or satellites that Johnson can use to catch up on political battles or other earthly drama. There are two water sources, one which is bitter and must be purified to drink, and the other which is sweet and fresh. There’s no mechanic or any other repairman on this planet. Even the spaceport is nothing more than a small stretch of land. This planet has a similar feel to that of a Midwestern rural town.

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Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net GRIFTERS' ASTEROID By H. L. GOLD Harvey and Joe were the slickest con-men ever to gyp a space-lane sucker. Or so they thought! Angus Johnson knew differently. He charged them five buckos for a glass of water—and got it! [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories May 1943. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Characteristically, Harvey Ellsworth tried to maintain his dignity, though his parched tongue was almost hanging out. But Joe Mallon, with no dignity to maintain, lurched across the rubbish-strewn patch of land that had been termed a spaceport. When Harvey staggered pontifically into the battered metalloy saloon—the only one on Planetoid 42—his tall, gangling partner was already stumbling out, mouthing something incoherent. They met in the doorway, violently. "We're delirious!" Joe cried. "It's a mirage!" "What is?" asked Harvey through a mouthful of cotton. Joe reeled aside, and Harvey saw what had upset his partner. He stared, speechless for once. In their hectic voyages from planet to planet, the pair of panacea purveyors had encountered the usual strange life-forms. But never had they seen anything like the amazing creature in that colonial saloon. Paying no attention to them, it was carrying a case of liquor in two hands, six siphons in two others, and a broom and dustpan in the remaining pair. The bartender, a big man resembling the plumpish Harvey in build, was leaning negligently on the counter, ordering this impossible being to fill the partly-emptied bottles, squeeze fruit juice and sweep the floor, all of which the native did simultaneously. "Nonsense," Harvey croaked uncertainly. "We have seen enough queer things to know there are always more." He led the way inside. Through thirst-cracked lips he rasped: "Water—quick!" Without a word, the bartender reached under the counter, brought out two glasses of water. The interplanetary con-men drank noisily, asked for more, until they had drunk eight glasses. Meanwhile, the bartender had taken out eight jiggers and filled them with whiskey. Harvey and Joe were breathing hard from having gulped the water so fast, but they were beginning to revive. They noticed the bartender's impersonal eyes studying them shrewdly. "Strangers, eh?" he asked at last. "Solar salesmen, my colonial friend," Harvey answered in his usual lush manner. "We purvey that renowned Martian remedy, La-anago Yergis , the formula for which was recently discovered by ourselves in the ancient ruined city of La-anago. Medical science is unanimous in proclaiming this magic medicine the sole panacea in the entire history of therapeutics." "Yeah?" said the bartender disinterestedly, polishing the chaser glasses without washing them. "Where you heading?" "Out of Mars for Ganymede. Our condenser broke down, and we've gone without water for five ghastly days." "Got a mechanic around this dumping ground you call a port?" Joe asked. "We did. He came near starving and moved on to Titan. Ships don't land here unless they're in trouble." "Then where's the water lead-in? We'll fill up and push off." "Mayor takes care of that," replied the saloon owner. "If you gents're finished at the bar, your drinks'll be forty buckos." Harvey grinned puzzledly. "We didn't take any whiskey." "Might as well. Water's five buckos a glass. Liquor's free with every chaser." Harvey's eyes bulged. Joe gulped. "That—that's robbery!" the lanky man managed to get out in a thin quaver. The barkeeper shrugged. "When there ain't many customers, you gotta make more on each one. Besides—" "Besides nothing!" Joe roared, finding his voice again. "You dirty crook—robbing poor spacemen! You—" "You dirty crook!" Joe roared. "Robbing honest spacemen!" Harvey nudged him warningly. "Easy, my boy, easy." He turned to the bartender apologetically. "Don't mind my friend. His adrenal glands are sometimes overactive. You were going to say—?" The round face of the barkeeper had assumed an aggrieved expression. "Folks are always thinkin' the other feller's out to do 'em," he said, shaking his head. "Lemme explain about the water here. It's bitter as some kinds of sin before it's purified. Have to bring it in with buckets and make it sweet. That takes time and labor. Waddya think—I was chargin' feller critters for water just out of devilment? I charge because I gotta." "Friend," said Harvey, taking out a wallet and counting off eight five-bucko bills, "here is your money. What's fair is fair, and you have put a different complexion on what seemed at first to be an unconscionable interjection of a middleman between Nature and man's thirst." The saloon man removed his dirty apron and came around the bar. "If that's an apology, I accept it. Now the mayor'll discuss filling your tanks. That's me. I'm also justice of the peace, official recorder, fire chief...." "And chief of police, no doubt," said Harvey jocosely. "Nope. That's my son, Jed. Angus Johnson's my name. Folks here just call me Chief. I run this town, and run it right. How much water will you need?" Joe estimated quickly. "About seventy-five liters, if we go on half rations," he answered. He waited apprehensively. "Let's say ten buckos a liter," the mayor said. "On account of the quantity, I'm able to quote a bargain price. Shucks, boys, it hurts me more to charge for water than it does for you to pay. I just got to, that's all." The mayor gestured to the native, who shuffled out to the tanks with them. The planetoid man worked the pump while the mayor intently watched the crude level-gauge, crying "Stop!" when it registered the proper amount. Then Johnson rubbed his thumb on his index finger and wetted his lips expectantly. Harvey bravely counted off the bills. He asked: "But what are we to do about replenishing our battery fluid? Ten buckos a liter would be preposterous. We simply can't afford it." Johnson's response almost floored them. "Who said anything about charging you for battery water? You can have all you want for nothing. It's just the purified stuff that comes so high." After giving them directions that would take them to the free-water pool, the ponderous factotum of Planetoid 42 shook hands and headed back to the saloon. His six-armed assistant followed him inside. "Now do you see, my hot-tempered colleague?" said Harvey as he and Joe picked up buckets that hung on the tank. "Johnson, as I saw instantly, is the victim of a difficult environment, and must charge accordingly." "Just the same," Joe griped, "paying for water isn't something you can get used to in ten minutes." In the fragile forest, they soon came across a stream that sprang from the igneous soil and splashed into the small pond whose contents, according to the mayor, was theirs for the asking. They filled their buckets and hauled them to the ship, then returned for more. It was on the sixth trip that Joe caught a glimpse of Jupiter-shine on a bright surface off to the left. The figure, 750, with the bucko sign in front of it, was still doing acrobatics inside his skull and keeping a faint suspicion alive in him. So he called Harvey and they went to investigate. Among the skimpy ground-crawling vines, they saw a long slender mound that was unmistakably a buried pipe. "What's this doing here?" Harvey asked, puzzled. "I thought Johnson had to transport water in pails." "Wonder where it leads to," Joe said uneasily. "It leads to the saloon," said Harvey, his eyes rapidly tracing the pipe back toward the spaceport. "What I am concerned with is where it leads from ." Five minutes later, panting heavily from the unaccustomed exertion of scrambling through the tangle of planetorial undergrowth, they burst into the open—before a clear, sparkling pool. Mutely, Harvey pointed out a pipe-end jutting under the water. "I am growing suspicious," he said in a rigidly controlled voice. But Joe was already on his knees, scooping up a handful of water and tasting it. "Sweet!" he snarled. They rushed back to the first pool, where Joe again tasted a sample. His mouth went wry. "Bitter! He uses only one pool, the sweet one! The only thing that needs purifying around here is that blasted mayor's conscience." "The asteroidal Poobah has tricked us with a slick come-on," said Harvey slowly. His eyes grew cold. "Joseph, the good-natured artist in me has become a hard and merciless avenger. I shall not rest until we have had the best of this colonial con-man! Watch your cues from this point hence." Fists clenched, the two returned to the saloon. But at the door they stopped and their fists unclenched. "Thought you gents were leaving," the mayor called out, seeing them frozen in the doorway. "Glad you didn't. Now you can meet my son, Jed. Him and me are the whole Earthman population of Johnson City." "You don't need any more," said Harvey, dismayed. Johnson's eight-foot son, topped by a massive roof of sun-bleached hair and held up by a foundation that seemed immovable, had obviously been born and raised in low gravity. For any decent-sized world would have kept him down near the general dimensions of a man. He held out an acre of palm. Harvey studied it worriedly, put his own hand somewhere on it, swallowed as it closed, then breathed again when his fingers were released in five units instead of a single compressed one. "Pleased to meet you," piped a voice that had never known a dense atmosphere. The pursuit of vengeance, Harvey realized, had taken a quick and unpleasant turn. Something shrewd was called for.... "Joseph!" he exclaimed, looking at his partner in alarm. "Don't you feel well?" Even before the others could turn to him, Joe's practiced eyes were gently crossing. He sagged against the door frame, all his features drooping like a bloodhound's. "Bring him in here!" Johnson cried. "I mean, get him away! He's coming down with asteroid fever!" "Of course," replied Harvey calmly. "Any fool knows the first symptoms of the disease that once scourged the universe." "What do you mean, once ?" demanded Johnson. "I come down with it every year, and I ain't hankering to have it in an off-season. Get him out of here!" "In good time. He can't be moved immediately." "Then he'll be here for months!" Harvey helped Joe to the counter and lifted him up on it. The mayor and his gigantic offspring were cowering across the room, trying to breathe in tiny, uncontaminating gasps. "You'll find everything you want in the back room," Johnson said frantically, "sulfopyridine, mustard plasters, rubs, inhalers, suction cups—" "Relics of the past," Harvey stated. "One medication is all modern man requires to combat the dread menace, asteroid fever." "What's that?" asked the mayor without conviction. Instead of replying, Harvey hurried outside to the ungainly second-hand rocket ship in the center of the shabby spaceport. He returned within a few minutes, carrying a bottle. Joe was still stretched out on the bar, panting, his eyes slowly crossing and uncrossing. Harvey lifted the patient's head tenderly, put the bottle to his lips and tilted it until he was forced to drink. When Joe tried to pull away, Harvey was inexorable. He made his partner drink until most of the liquid was gone. Then he stepped back and waited for the inevitable result. Joe's performance was better than ever. He lay supine for several moments, his face twisted into an expression that seemed doomed to perpetual wryness. Slowly, however, he sat up and his features straightened out. "Are—are you all right?" asked the mayor anxiously. "Much better," said Joe in a weak voice. "Maybe you need another dose," Harvey suggested. Joe recoiled. "I'm fine now!" he cried, and sprang off the bar to prove it. Astonished, Johnson and his son drew closer. They searched Joe's face, and then the mayor timidly felt his pulse. "Well, I'll be hanged!" Johnson ejaculated. " La-anago Yergis never fails, my friend," Harvey explained. "By actual test, it conquers asteroid fever in from four to twenty-three minutes, depending on the severity of the attack. Luckily, we caught this one before it grew formidable." The mayor's eyes became clouded mirrors of an inward conflict. "If you don't charge too much," he said warily, "I might think of buying some." "We do not sell this unbelievable remedy," Harvey replied with dignity. "It sells itself." "'Course, I'd expect a considerable reduction if I bought a whole case," said Johnson. "That would be the smallest investment you could make, compared with the vast loss of time and strength the fever involves." "How much?" asked the mayor unhappily. "For you, since you have taken us in so hospitably, a mere five hundred buckos." Johnson did not actually stagger back, but he gave the impression of doing so. "F-four hundred," he offered. "Not a red cent less than four seventy-five," Harvey said flatly. "Make it four fifty," quavered Johnson. "I dislike haggling," said Harvey. The final price, however, was four hundred and sixty-nine buckos and fifty redsents. Magnanimously, Harvey added: "And we will include, gratis , an elegant bottle-opener, a superb product of Mercurian handicraftsmanship." Johnson stabbed out a warning finger. "No tricks now. I want a taste of that stuff. You're not switching some worthless junk on me." Harvey took a glass from the bar and poured him a generous sample. The mayor sniffed it, grimaced, then threw it down his gullet. The ensuing minute saw a grim battle between a man and his stomach, a battle which the man gradually won. "There ain't no words for that taste," he gulped when it was safe to talk again. "Medicine," Harvey propounded, "should taste like medicine." To Joe he said: "Come, my esteemed colleague. We must perform the sacred task to which we have dedicated ourselves." With Joe stumbling along behind, he left the saloon, crossed the clearing and entered the ship. As soon as they were inside, Joe dropped his murderous silence and cried: "What kind of a dirty trick was that, giving me poison instead of that snake oil?" "That was not poison," Harvey contradicted quietly. "It was La-anago Yergis extract, plus." "Plus what—arsenic?" "Now, Joseph! Consider my quandary when I came back here to manufacture our specific for all known ailments, with the intention of selling yonder asteroidal tin-horn a bill of medical goods—an entire case, mind you. Was I to mix the extract with the water for which we had been swindled to the tune of ten buckos a liter? Where would our profit have been, then? No; I had to use the bitter free water, of course." "But why use it on me?" Joe demanded furiously. Harvey looked reprovingly at his gangling partner. "Did Johnson ask to taste it, or did he not? One must look ahead, Joseph. I had to produce the same medicine that we will now manufacture. Thus, you were a guinea pig for a splendid cause." "Okay, okay," Joe said. "But you shoulda charged him more." "Joseph, I promise you that we shall get back every redsent of which that swindler cheated us, besides whatever other funds or valuables he possesses. We could not be content with less." "Well, we're starting all right," admitted Joe. "How about that thing with six arms? He looks like a valuable. Can't we grab him off?" Harvey stopped filling bottles and looked up pensively. "I have every hope of luring away the profitable monstrosity. Apparently you have also surmised the fortune we could make with him. At first I purpose to exhibit him on our interplanetary tours with our streamlined panacea; he would be a spectacular attraction for bucolic suckers. Later, a brief period of demonstrating his abilities on the audio-visiphone. Then our triumph—we shall sell him at a stupendous figure to the zoo!" Joe was still dazed by that monetary vista when he and Harvey carried the case of medicine to the saloon. The mayor had already cleared a place of honor in the cluttered back room, where he told them to put it down carefully. Then he took the elaborate bottle-opener Harvey gave him, reverently uncorked a bottle and sampled it. It must have been at least as good as the first; he gagged. "That's the stuff, all right," he said, swallowing hard. He counted out the money into Harvey's hand, at a moderate rate that precariously balanced between his pleasure at getting the fever remedy and his pain at paying for it. Then he glanced out to see the position of Jupiter, and asked: "You gents eaten yet? The restaurant's open now." Harvey and Joe looked at each other. They hadn't been thinking about food at all, but suddenly they realized that they were hungry. "It's only water we were short of," Harvey said apprehensively. "We've got rations back at the ship." " H-mph! " the mayor grunted. "Powdered concentrates. Compressed pap. Suit yourselves. We treat our stomachs better here. And you're welcome to our hospitality." "Your hospitality," said Harvey, "depends on the prices you charge." "Well, if that's what's worrying you, you can stop worrying," answered the mayor promptly. "What's more, the kind of dinner I serve here you can't get anywhere else for any price." Swiftly, Harvey conned the possibilities of being bilked again. He saw none. "Let's take a look at the menu, anyhow, Joe," he said guardedly. Johnson immediately fell into the role of "mine host." "Come right in, gents," he invited. "Right into the dining room." He seated them at a table, which a rope tied between posts made more or less private, though nobody else was in the saloon and there was little chance of company. Genius, the six-armed native, appeared from the dingy kitchen with two menus in one hand, two glasses of water in another, plus napkins, silverware, a pitcher, plates, saucers, cups, and their cocktails, which were on the house. Then he stood by for orders. Harvey and Joe studied the menu critically. The prices were phenomenally low. When they glanced up at Johnson in perplexity, he grinned, bowed and asked: "Everything satisfactory, gents?" "Quite," said Harvey. "We shall order." For an hour they were served amazing dishes, both fresh and canned, the culinary wealth of this planetoid and all the system. And the service was as extraordinary as the meal itself. With four hands, Genius played deftly upon a pair of mellow Venusian viotars , using his other two hands for waiting on the table. "We absolutely must purchase this incredible specimen," Harvey whispered excitedly when Johnson and the native were both in the kitchen, attending to the next course. "He would make any society hostess's season a riotous success, which should be worth a great sum to women like Mrs. van Schuyler-Morgan, merely for his hire." "Think of a fast one fast," Joe agreed. "You're right." "But I dislike having to revise my opinion of a man so often," complained Harvey. "I wish Johnson would stay either swindler or honest merchant. This dinner is worth as least twenty buckos, yet I estimate our check at a mere bucko twenty redsents." The mayor's appearance prevented them from continuing the discussion. "It's been a great honor, gents," he said. "Ain't often I have visitors, and I like the best, like you two gents." As if on cue, Genius came out and put the check down between Joe and Harvey. Harvey picked it up negligently, but his casual air vanished in a yelp of horror. "What the devil is this?" he shouted.—"How do you arrive at this fantastic, idiotic figure— three hundred and twenty-eight buckos !" Johnson didn't answer. Neither did Genius; he simply put on the table, not a fingerbowl, but a magnifying glass. With one of his thirty fingers he pointed politely to the bottom of the menu. Harvey focused on the microscopic print, and his face went pasty with rage. The minute note read: "Services and entertainment, 327 buckos 80 redsents." "You can go to hell!" Joe growled. "We won't pay it!" Johnson sighed ponderously. "I was afraid you'd act like that," he said with regret. He pulled a tin badge out of his rear pocket, pinned it on his vest, and twisted his holstered gun into view. "Afraid I'll have to ask the sheriff to take over." Johnson, the "sheriff," collected the money, and Johnson, the "restaurateur," pocketed it. Meanwhile, Harvey tipped Joe the sign to remain calm. "My friend," he said to the mayor, and his tones took on a schoolmasterish severity, "your long absence from Earth has perhaps made you forget those elements of human wisdom that have entered the folk-lore of your native planet. Such as, for example: 'It is folly to kill a goose that lays golden eggs,' and 'Penny wise is pound foolish.'" "I don't get the connection," objected Johnson. "Well, by obliging us to pay such a high price for your dinner, you put out of your reach the chance of profiting from a really substantial deal. My partner and I were prepared to make you a sizable offer for the peculiar creature you call Genius. But by reducing our funds the way you have—" "Who said I wanted to sell him?" the mayor interrupted. He rubbed his fingers together and asked disinterestedly: "What were you going to offer, anyhow?" "It doesn't matter any longer," Harvey said with elaborate carelessness. "Perhaps you wouldn't have accepted it, anyway." "That's right," Johnson came back emphatically. "But what would your offer have been which I would have turned down?" "Which one? The one we were going to make, or the one we can make now?" "Either one. It don't make no difference. Genius is too valuable to sell." "Oh, come now, Mr. Johnson. Don't tell me no amount of money would tempt you!" "Nope. But how much did you say?" "Ah, then you will consider releasing Genius!" "Well, I'll tell you something," said the mayor confidentially. "When you've got one thing, you've got one thing. But when you've got money, it's the same as having a lot of things. Because, if you've got money, you can buy this and that and this and that and—" "This and that," concluded Joe. "We'll give you five hundred buckos." "Now, gents!" Johnson remonstrated. "Why, six hundred would hardly—" "You haven't left us much money," Harvey put in. The mayor frowned. "All right, we'll split the difference. Make it five-fifty." Harvey was quick to pay out, for this was a genuine windfall. Then he stood up and admired the astonishing possession he had so inexpensively acquired. "I really hate to deprive you of this unique creature," he said to Johnson. "I should imagine you will be rather lonely, with only your filial mammoth to keep you company." "I sure will," Johnson confessed glumly. "I got pretty attached to Genius, and I'm going to miss him something awful." Harvey forcibly removed his eyes from the native, who was clearing off the table almost all at once. "My friend," he said, "we take your only solace, it is true, but in his place we can offer something no less amazing and instructive." The mayor's hand went protectively to his pocket. "What is it?" he asked with the suspicion of a man who has seen human nature at its worst and expects nothing better. "Joseph, get our most prized belonging from the communications room of the ship," Harvey instructed. To Johnson he explained: "You must see the wondrous instrument before its value can be appreciated. My partner will soon have it here for your astonishment." Joe's face grew as glum as Johnson's had been. "Aw, Harv," he protested, "do we have to sell it? And right when I thought we were getting the key!" "We must not be selfish, my boy," Harvey said nobly. "We have had our chance; now we must relinquish Fate to the hands of a man who might have more success than we. Go, Joseph. Bring it here." Unwillingly, Joe turned and shuffled out. On a larger and heavier world than Planetoid 42, Johnson's curiosity would probably have had weight and mass. He was bursting with questions, but he was obviously afraid they would cost him money. For his part, Harvey allowed that curiosity to grow like a Venusian amoeba until Joe came in, lugging a radio. "Is that what you were talking about?" the mayor snorted. "What makes you think I want a radio? I came here to get away from singers and political speech-makers." "Do not jump to hasty conclusions," Harvey cautioned. "Another word, and I shall refuse you the greatest opportunity any man has ever had, with the sole exceptions of Joseph, myself and the unfortunate inventor of this absolutely awe-inspiring device." "I ain't in the market for a radio," Johnson said stubbornly. Harvey nodded in relief. "We have attempted to repay our host, Joseph. He has spurned our generosity. We have now the chance to continue our study, which I am positive will soon reward us with the key to an enormous fortune." "Well, that's no plating off our bow," Joe grunted. "I'm glad he did turn it down. I hated to give it up after working on it for three whole years." He picked up the radio and began walking toward the door. "Now, hold on!" the mayor cried. "I ain't saying I'll buy, but what is it I'm turning down?" Joe returned and set the instrument down on the bar. His face sorrowful, Harvey fondly stroked the scarred plasticoid cabinet. "To make a long story, Mr. Johnson," he said, "Joseph and I were among the chosen few who knew the famous Doctor Dean intimately. Just before his tragic death, you will recall, Dean allegedly went insane." He banged his fist on the bar. "I have said it before, and I repeat again, that was a malicious lie, spread by the doctor's enemies to discredit his greatest invention—this fourth dimensional radio!" "This what?" Johnson blurted out. "In simple terms," clarified Harvey, "the ingenious doctor discovered that the yawning chasm between the dimensions could be bridged by energy of all quanta. There has never been any question that the inhabitants of the super-dimension would be far more civilized than ourselves. Consequently, the man who could tap their knowledge would find himself in possession of a powerful, undreamt-of science!" The mayor looked respectfully at the silent box on the bar. "And this thing gets broadcasts from the fourth dimension?" "It does, Mr. Johnson! Only charlatans like those who envied Doctor Dean's magnificent accomplishments could deny that fact." The mayor put his hands in his pockets, unswiveled one hip and stared thoughtfully at the battered cabinet. "Well, let's say it picks up fourth dimensional broadcasts," he conceded. "But how could you understand what they're saying? Folks up there wouldn't talk our language." Again Harvey smashed his fist down. "Do you dare to repeat the scurvy lie that broke Dean's spirit and drove him to suicide?" Johnson recoiled. "No—no, of course not . I mean, being up here, I naturally couldn't get all the details." "Naturally," Harvey agreed, mollified. "I'm sorry I lost my temper. But it is a matter of record that the doctor proved the broadcasts emanating from the super-dimension were in English! Why should that be so difficult to believe? Is it impossible that at one time there was communication between the dimensions, that the super-beings admired our language and adopted it in all its beauty, adding to it their own hyper-scientific trimmings?" "Why, I don't know," Johnson said in confusion. "For three years, Joseph and I lost sleep and hair, trying to detect the simple key that would translate the somewhat metamorphosed broadcasts into our primitive English. It eluded us. Even the doctor failed. But that was understandable; a sensitive soul like his could stand only so much. And the combination of ridicule and failure to solve the mystery caused him to take his own life." Johnson winced. "Is that what you want to unload on me?" "For a very good reason, sir. Patience is the virtue that will be rewarded with the key to these fourth dimensional broadcasts. A man who could devote his life to improving this lonely worldlet is obviously a person with unusual patience." "Yeah," the mayor said grudgingly, "I ain't exactly flighty." "Therefore, you are the man who could unravel the problem!" Johnson asked skeptically: "How about a sample first?" Harvey turned a knob on the face of the scarred radio. After several squeals of spatial figures, a smooth voice began: "There are omnious pleajes of moby-hailegs in sonmirand which, howgraismon, are notch to be donfured miss ellasellabell in either or both hagasanipaj, by all means. This does not refly, on the brother man, nat or mizzafil saces are denuded by this ossifaligo...." Harvey switched off the set determinedly. "Wait a minute!" Johnson begged. "I almost got it then!" "I dislike being commercial," said Harvey, "but this astounding device still belongs to us. Would we not be foolish to let you discover the clue before purchasing the right to do so?" The mayor nodded indecisively, looking at the radio with agonized longing. "How much do you want?" he asked unhappily. "One thousand buckos, and no haggling. I am not in the mood." Johnson opened his mouth to argue; then, seeing Harvey's set features, paid with the worst possible grace. "Don't you think we ought to tell him about the batteries, Harv?" Joe asked. "What about the batteries?" demanded Johnson with deadly calm. "A very small matter," Harvey said airily. "You see, we have been analyzing these broadcasts for three years. In that time, of course, the batteries are bound to weaken. I estimate these should last not less than one Terrestrial month, at the very least." "What do I do then?" Harvey shrugged. "Special batteries are required, which I see Joseph has by chance brought along. For the batteries, the only ones of their kind left in the system, I ask only what they cost—one hundred and ninety-nine buckos, no more and, on the other hand, no less." Johnson was breathing hard, and his hand hovered dangerously near his gun. But he paid the amount Harvey wanted. Moreover, he actually shook hands when the two panacea purveyors collected their six-armed prize and said goodbye. Before they were outside, however, he had turned on the radio and was listening tensely to a woman's highly cultured, though rather angry voice, saying: "Oh, you hannaforge are all beasa-taga-sanimort. If you rue amount it, how do you respench a pure woman to ansver go-samak—" "I'll get it!" they heard Johnson mutter. Then the sound of giant feet crossing the barroom floor reached their ears, and a shrill question: "What's that, Papa?" "A fortune, Jed! Those fakers are damned fools, selling us a thing like—" Joe gazed at Harvey admiringly. "Another one sold? Harv, that spiel pulls them in like an ether storm!" Together with the remarkable planetoid man, they reached the ship. Above them, dark, tumbling shapes blotted out the stars and silently moved on. Joe opened the gangway door. "Come on in, pal," he said to Genius. "We're shoving off." The planetoid man grinned foolishly. "Can't go arong with you," he said with an apologetic manner. "I rike to, but pressure fratten me out if I go." "What in solar blazes are you talking about?" Harvey asked. "I grow up on pranetoid," Genius explained. "On big pranet, too much pressure for me." The two salesmen looked narrowly at each other. "Did Johnson know that when he sold you?" Joe snarled. "Oh, sure." The silly grin became wider than ever. "Peopre from Earth buy me rots of times. I never reave pranetoid, though." "Joseph," Harvey said ominously, "that slick colonist has put one over upon us. What is our customary procedure in that event?" "We tear him apart," Joe replied between his teeth. "Not Mister Johnson," advised Genius. "Have gun and badge. He shoot you first and then rock you up in prison." Harvey paused, his ominous air vanishing. "True. There is also the fact, Joseph, that when he discovers the scrambled rectifier in the radio we sold him, he will have been paid back in full for his regrettable dishonesty." Unwillingly, Joe agreed. While Genius retreated to a safe distance, they entered the ship and blasted off. Within a few minutes the automatic steering pilot had maneuvered them above the plane of the asteroid belt. "I got kind of dizzy," Joe said, "there were so many deals back and forth. How much did we make on the sucker?" "A goodly amount, I wager," Harvey responded. He took out a pencil and paper. "Medicine, 469.50; radio, 1,000; batteries, 199. Total—let's see—1668 buckos and 50 redsents. A goodly sum, as I told you." He emptied his pockets of money, spread it out on the astrogation table and began counting. Finished, he looked up, troubled. "How much did we have when we landed, Joseph?" "Exactly 1668 buckos," Joe answered promptly. "I can't understand it," said Harvey. "Instead of double our capital, we now have only 1668 buckos and 50 redsents!" Feverishly, he returned to his pencil and paper. "Drinking water, 790; battery water, free; meal, 328; planetoid man, 550. Total: 1668 buckos!" He stared at the figures. "We paid out almost as much as we took in," he said bitterly. "Despite our intensive efforts, we made the absurd sum of fifty redsents." "Why, the dirty crook!" Joe growled. But after a few moments of sad reflection, Harvey became philosophical. "Perhaps, Joseph, we are more fortunate than we realize. We were, after all, completely in Johnson's power. The more I ponder, the more I believe we were lucky to escape. And, anyhow, we did make fifty redsents on the swindler. A moral victory, my boy." Joe, who had been sunk desparingly into a chair, now stood up slowly and asked: "Remember that bottle-opener we gave him?" "Certainly," Harvey explained. "What about it?" "How much did it cost us?" Harvey's eyebrows puckered. Suddenly he started laughing. "You're right, Joseph. We paid forty-six redsents for it on Venus. So, after all that transacting of business, we made four redsents!" "Four redsents, hell!" Joe snapped. "That was the sales tax!" He glared; then a smile lifted his mouth. "You remember those yokels on Mars' Flatlands, and the way they worshipped gold?" " Goldbricks! " Harvey said succinctly. Grinning, Joe set the robot-controls for Mars.

Describe the setting of the story.

3

The story takes place on Planetoid 42, a small and mostly deserted location that lies somewhere between Mars and Ganymede. Because it is small, the gravitational pull is much lower than the larger planets that humans are used to. It is not very well developed in the sense of infrastructure, and there are not many buildings—in fact, only two humans live there, Johnson and his son, although Genius grew up on the planetoid. The saloon is where we encounter our protagonists for the first time, and it is located on a poorly kept stretch of land covered in trash. Outside of the saloon are the water tanks where Johnson keeps his filtered water to sell the people passing through. There are at least two bodies of water outside, one with bitter water that is used for battery fluid, and one that has clean water that Johnson keeps a secret. These locations are connected through sets of pipes that allow Johnson to keep his freshwater tanks full. Most of the story takes place inside the saloon itself. It is at the bar where Joe and Harvey found water to drink at the beginning of the story, this is the bar that Joe lies on when he pretends to have asteroid fever, and this was the area that served as the restaurant where they ate. A few scenes take place inside of Joe and Harvey’s ship, as they eventually leave Planetoid 42, but also when Harvey pulled the medicine con.

61007

IT WAS A DULL, ROUTINE LITTLE WORLD. IT DIDN'T EVEN HAVE A CITY. EVERYTHING IT HAD WAS IN THE GARDEN BY R. A. LAFFERTY [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, March 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] The protozoic recorder chirped like a bird. Not only would there be life traces on that little moon, but it would be a lively place. So they skipped several steps in the procedure. The chordata discerner read Positive over most of the surface. There was spinal fluid on that orb, rivers of it. So again they omitted several tests and went to the cognition scanner. Would it show Thought on the body? Naturally they did not get results at once, nor did they expect to; it required a fine adjustment. But they were disappointed that they found nothing for several hours as they hovered high over the rotation. Then it came—clearly and definitely, but from quite a small location only. "Limited," said Steiner, "as though within a pale. As though there were but one city, if that is its form. Shall we follow the rest of the surface to find another, or concentrate on this? It'll be twelve hours before it's back in our ken if we let it go now." "Let's lock on this one and finish the scan. Then we can do the rest of the world to make sure we've missed nothing," said Stark. There was one more test to run, one very tricky and difficult of analysis, that with the Extraordinary Perception Locator. This was designed simply to locate a source of superior thought. But this might be so varied or so unfamiliar that often both the machine and the designer of it were puzzled as to how to read the results. The E. P. Locator had been designed by Glaser. But when the Locator had refused to read Positive when turned on the inventor himself, bad blood developed between machine and man. Glaser knew that he had extraordinary perception. He was a much honored man in his field. He told the machine so heatedly. The machine replied, with such warmth that its relays chattered, that Glaser did not have extraordinary perception; he had only ordinary perception to an extraordinary degree. There is a difference , the machine insisted. It was for this reason that Glaser used that model no more, but built others more amenable. And it was for this reason also that the owners of Little Probe had acquired the original machine so cheaply. And there was no denying that the Extraordinary Perception Locator (or Eppel) was a contrary machine. On Earth it had read Positive on a number of crack-pots, including Waxey Sax, a jazz tootler who could not even read music. But it had also read Positive on ninety per cent of the acknowledged superior minds of the Earth. In space it had been a sound guide to the unusual intelligences encountered. Yet on Suzuki-Mi it had read Positive on a two-inch-long worm, only one of them out of billions. For the countless identical worms no trace of anything at all was shown by the test. So it was with mixed expectations that Steiner locked onto the area and got a flick. He then narrowed to a smaller area (apparently one individual, though this could not be certain) and got very definite action. Eppel was busy. The machine had a touch of the ham in it, and assumed an air of importance when it ran these tests. Finally it signaled the result, the most exasperating result it ever produces: the single orange light. It was the equivalent of the shrug of the shoulders in a man. They called it the "You tell me light." So among the intelligences there was at least one that might be extraordinary, though possibly in a crackpot way. It is good to be forewarned. "Scan the remainder of the world, Steiner," said Stark, "and the rest of us will get some sleep. If you find no other spot then we will go down on that one the next time it is in position under us, in about twelve hours." "You don't want to visit any of the other areas first? Somewhere away from the thoughtful creature?" "No. The rest of the world may be dangerous. There must be a reason that thought is in one spot only. If we find no others then we will go down boldly and visit this." So they all, except Steiner, went off to their bunks then: Stark, the Captain; Gregory Gilbert, the executive officer; Wolfgang Langweilig, the engineer; Casper Craig, super-cargo, tycoon and 51% owner of the Little Probe, and F. R. Briton, S.J., a Jesuit priest who was linguist and checker champion of the craft. Dawn did not come to the moon-town. The Little Probe hovered stationary in the light and the moon-town came up under the dawn. Then the Probe went down to visit whatever was there. "There's no town," said Steiner. "Not a building. Yet we're on the track of the minds. There's nothing but a meadow and some boscage, a sort of fountain or pool, and four streams coming out of it." "Keep on towards the minds," said Stark. "They're our target." "Not a building, not two sticks or stones placed together. That looks like an Earth-type sheep there. And that looks like an Earth-lion, I'm almost afraid to say. And those two ... why, they could well be Earth-people. But with a difference. Where is that bright light coming from?" "I don't know, but they're right in the middle of it. Land here. We'll go to meet them at once. Timidity has never been an efficacious tool with us." Well, they were people. And one could only wish that all people were like them. There was a man and a woman, and they were clothed either in very bright garments or in no garments at all, but only in a very bright light. "Talk to them, Father Briton," said Stark. "You are the linguist." "Howdy," said the priest. He may or may not have been understood, but the two of them smiled at him, so he went on. "Father Briton from Philadelphia," he said, "on detached service. And you, my good man, what is your handle, your monicker, your tag?" "Ha-Adamah," said the man. "And your daughter, or niece?" It may be that the shining man frowned momentarily at this; but the woman smiled, proving that she was human. "The woman is named Hawwah," said the man. "The sheep is named sheep, the lion is named lion, the horse is named horse and the hoolock is named hoolock." "I understand. It is possible that this could go on and on. How is it that you use the English tongue?" "I have only one tongue; but it is given to us to be understood by all; by the eagle, by the squirrel, by the ass, by the English." "We happen to be bloody Yankees, but we use a borrowed tongue. You wouldn't have a drink on you for a tubful of thirsty travellers, would you?" "The fountain." "Ah—I see." But the crew all drank of the fountain to be sociable. It was water, but water that excelled, cool and with all its original bubbles like the first water ever made. "What do you make of them?" asked Stark. "Human," said Steiner. "It may even be that they are a little more than human. I don't understand that light that surrounds them. And they seem to be clothed, as it were, in dignity." "And very little else," said Father Briton, "though that light trick does serve a purpose. But I'm not sure they'd pass in Philadelphia." "Talk to them again," said Stark. "You're the linguist." "That isn't necessary here, Captain. Talk to them yourself." "Are there any other people here?" Stark asked the man. "The two of us. Man and woman." "But are there any others?" "How would there be any others? What other kind of people could there be than man and woman?" "But is there more than one man or woman?" "How could there be more than one of anything?" The captain was a little puzzled by this, but he went on doggedly: "Ha-Adamah, what do you think that we are? Are we not people?" "You are not anything till I name you. But I will name you and then you can be. You are named Captain. He is named Priest. He is named Engineer. He is named Flunky." "Thanks a lot," said Steiner. "But are we not people?" persisted Captain Stark. "No. We are the people. There are no people but two. How could there be other people?" "And the damnest thing about it," muttered Langweilig, "is, how are you going to prove him wrong? But it does give you a small feeling." "Can we have something to eat?" asked the Captain. "Pick from the trees," said Ha-Adamah, "and then it may be that you will want to sleep on the grass. Being not of human nature (which does not need sleep or rest), it may be that you require respite. But you are free to enjoy the garden and its fruits." "We will," said Captain Stark. They wandered about the place, but they were uneasy. There were the animals. The lion and lioness were enough to make one cautious, though they offered no harm. The two bears had a puzzling look, as though they wanted either to frolic with you or to mangle you. "If there are only two people here," said Casper Craig, "then it may be that the rest of the world is not dangerous at all. It looked fertile wherever we scanned it, though not so fertile as this central bit. And those rocks would bear examining." "Flecked with gold, and possibly with something else," said Stark. "A very promising site." "And everything grows here," added Steiner. "Those are Earth-fruits and I never saw finer. I've tasted the grapes and plums and pears. The figs and dates are superb, the quince is as flavorsome as a quince can be, the cherries are excellent. And I never did taste such oranges. But I haven't yet tried the—" and he stopped. "If you're thinking what I'm afraid to think," said Gilbert, "then it will be the test at least: whether we're having a pleasant dream or whether this is reality. Go ahead and eat one." "I won't be the first to eat one. You eat." "Ask him first. You ask him." "Ha-Adamah, is it allowed to eat the apples?" "Certainly. Eat. It is the finest fruit in the garden." "Well, the analogy breaks down there," said Stark. "I was almost beginning to believe in the thing. But if it isn't that, then what. Father Briton, you are the linguist, but in Hebrew does not Ha-Adamah and Hawwah mean—?" "Of course they do. You know that as well as I." "I was never a believer. But would it be possible for the exact same proposition to maintain here as on Earth?" "All things are possible." And it was then that Ha-Adamah, the shining man, gave a wild cry: "No, no. Do not approach it. It is not allowed to eat of that one!" It was the pomegranate tree, and he was warning Langweilig away from it. "Once more, Father," said Stark, "you should be the authority; but does not the idea that it was the apple that was forbidden go back only to a medieval painting?" "It does. The name of the fruit is not mentioned in Genesis. In Hebrew exegesis, however, the pomegranate is usually indicated." "I thought so. Question the man further, Father. This is too incredible." "It is a little odd. Adam, old man, how long have you been here?" "Forever less six days is the answer that has been given to me. I never did understand the answer, however." "And have you gotten no older in all that time?" "I do not understand what 'older' is. I am as I have been from the beginning." "And do you think that you will ever die?" "To die I do not understand. I am taught that it is a property of fallen nature to die, and that does not pertain to me or mine." "And are you completely happy here?" "Perfectly happy according to my preternatural state. But I am taught that it might be possible to lose that happiness, and then to seek it vainly through all the ages. I am taught that sickness and ageing and even death could come if this happiness were ever lost. I am taught that on at least one other unfortunate world it has actually been lost." "Do you consider yourself a knowledgeable man?" "Yes, since I am the only man, and knowledge is natural to man. But I am further blessed. I have a preternatural intellect." Then Stark cut in once more: "There must be some one question you could ask him, Father. Some way to settle it. I am becoming nearly convinced." "Yes, there is a question that will settle it. Adam, old man, how about a game of checkers?" "This is hardly the time for clowning," said Stark. "I'm not clowning, Captain. How about it, Adam? I'll give you choice of colors and first move." "No. It would be no contest. I have a preternatural intellect." "Well, I beat a barber who was champion of Germantown. And I beat the champion of Morgan County, Tennessee, which is the hottest checker center on Earth. I've played against, and beaten, machines. But I never played a preternatural mind. Let's just set up the board, Adam, and have a go at it." "No. It would be no contest. I would not like to humble you." They were there for three days. They were delighted with the place. It was a world with everything, and it seemed to have only two inhabitants. They went everywhere except into the big cave. "What is there, Adam?" asked Captain Stark. "The great serpent lives there. I would not disturb him. He has long been cranky because plans he had for us did not materialize. But we are taught that should ever evil come to us, which it cannot if we persevere, it will come by him." They learned no more of the real nature of the sphere in their time there. Yet all but one of them were convinced of the reality when they left. And they talked of it as they took off. "A crowd would laugh if told of it," said Stark, "but not many would laugh if they had actually seen the place, or them. I am not a gullible man, but I am convinced of this: that this is a pristine and pure world and that ours and all the others we have visited are fallen worlds. Here are the prototypes of our first parents before their fall. They are garbed in light and innocence, and they have the happiness that we have been seeking for centuries. It would be a crime if anyone disturbed that happiness." "I too am convinced," said Steiner. "It is Paradise itself, where the lion lies down with the lamb, and where the serpent has not prevailed. It would be the darkest of crimes if we or others should play the part of the serpent, and intrude and spoil." "I am probably the most skeptical man in the world," said Casper Craig the tycoon, "but I do believe my eyes. I have been there and seen it. It is indeed an unspoiled Paradise; and it would be a crime calling to the wide heavens for vengeance for anyone to smirch in any way that perfection. "So much for that. Now to business. Gilbert, take a gram: Ninety Million Square Miles of Pristine Paradise for Sale or Lease. Farming, Ranching, exceptional opportunities for Horticulture. Gold, Silver, Iron, Earth-Type Fauna. Terms. Special Rates for Large Settlement Parties. Write, Gram, or call in person at any of our planetary offices as listed below. Ask for Brochure—Eden Acres Unlimited." Down in the great cave that Old Serpent, a two-legged one among whose names were "Snake-Oil Sam," spoke to his underlings: "It'll take them fourteen days to get back with the settlers. We'll have time to overhaul the blasters. We haven't had any well-equipped settlers for six weeks. It used to be we'd hardly have time to strip and slaughter and stow before there was another batch to take care of." "I think you'd better write me some new lines," said Adam. "I feel like a goof saying those same ones to each bunch." "You are a goof, and therefore perfect for the part. I was in show business long enough to know never to change a line too soon. I did change Adam and Eve to Ha-Adamah and Hawwah, and the apple to the pomegranate. People aren't becoming any smarter—but they are becoming better researched, and they insist on authenticity. "This is still a perfect come-on here. There is something in human nature that cannot resist the idea of a Perfect Paradise. Folks will whoop and holler to their neighbors to come in droves to spoil and mar it. It isn't greed or the desire for new land so much—though that is strong too. Mainly it is the feverish passion to befoul and poison what is unspoiled. Fortunately I am sagacious enough to take advantage of this trait. And when you start to farm a new world on a shoestring you have to acquire your equipment as you can." He looked proudly around at the great cave with its mountains and tiers of materials, heavy machinery of all sorts, titanic crates of foodstuff space-sealed; wheeled, tracked, propped, vaned and jetted vehicles; and power packs to run a world. He looked at the three dozen space ships stripped and stacked, and at the rather large pile of bone-meal in one corner. "We will have to have another lion," said Eve. "Bowser is getting old, and Marie-Yvette abuses him and gnaws his toes. And we do have to have a big-maned lion to lie down with the lamb." "I know it, Eve. The lion is a very important prop. Maybe one of the crackpot settlers will bring a new lion." "And can't you mix another kind of shining paint? This itches. It's hell." "I'm working on it." Casper Craig was still dictating the gram: "Amazing quality of longevity seemingly inherent in the locale. Climate ideal. Daylight or half-light. All twenty-one hours from Planet Delphina and from Sol. Pure water for all industrial purposes. Scenic and storied. Zoning and pre-settlement restrictions to insure congenial neighbors. A completely planned globular settlement in a near arm of our own galaxy. Low taxes and liberal credit. Financing our specialty—" "And you had better have an armed escort when you return," said Father Briton. "Why in cosmos would we want an armed escort?" "It's as phony as a seven-credit note!" "You, a man of the cloth doubt it? And us ready skeptics convinced by our senses? Why do you doubt?" "It is only the unbelieving who believe so easily in obvious frauds. Theologically unsound, dramaturgically weak, philologically impossible, zoologically rigged, salted conspicuously with gold and shot through with anachronisms. And moreover he was afraid to play me at checkers." "What?" "If I have a preternatural intellect I wouldn't be afraid of a game of checkers with anyone. Yet there was an unusual mind there somewhere; it was just that he chose not to make our acquaintance personally." "They looked at the priest thoughtfully. "But it was Paradise in one way," said Steiner at last. "How?" "All the time we were there the woman did not speak."

What is the plot of the story?

5

The story describes the crew of a probe spaceship as it investigates an extraterrestrial world. The crew is made up of Stark, Gilbert, Steiner, Langweilig, Craig, and Briton—the captain, executive officer, crewmember, engineer, part-owner of the probe, and a Catholic priest respectively. From orbit, the crew scans the moon using various technological instruments. They discover abundant highly developed life forms including a small location of sentient life, possibly of extraordinary magnitude. They descend to the moon’s surface near the location of the sentient life. They discover a multitude of plants and animals that are found on Earth, also finding two individuals that appear to be human, Ha-Adamah and Hawwah. Their investigation of the surroundings bears a startling resemblance to the biblical story of Genesis. The crew is bewildered to consider that this may indeed be a new Garden of Eden which never fell into sin and was preserved as a perfect paradise. After remaining for a few days, the crew returns to their probe. They remark how immoral it would be to meddle such an unspoiled paradise, but nevertheless begin the process of advertising the world to potential colonizers who would indeed exploit the moon for profit. Surprisingly, it is revealed that back on the planet that the individuals that were merely posing as Ha-Adamah and Hawwah working with their boss, Snake-oil Sam, to deceive potential colonists, ambushing them upon arrival and confiscating their valuable supplies and equipment. Back on the probe Father Briton chides the rest of the crew that they had been taken in by an obvious ruse and to inform any potential colonists to prepare for armed resistance. The incredulous crew demands to know the reasoning behind his conclusion. He casually says that besides what he contended were glaring inaccuracies, the fact that Ha-Adamah refused to play him in checkers despite claiming to have a preternaturally perfect intellect was all the proof he needed.

61007

IT WAS A DULL, ROUTINE LITTLE WORLD. IT DIDN'T EVEN HAVE A CITY. EVERYTHING IT HAD WAS IN THE GARDEN BY R. A. LAFFERTY [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, March 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] The protozoic recorder chirped like a bird. Not only would there be life traces on that little moon, but it would be a lively place. So they skipped several steps in the procedure. The chordata discerner read Positive over most of the surface. There was spinal fluid on that orb, rivers of it. So again they omitted several tests and went to the cognition scanner. Would it show Thought on the body? Naturally they did not get results at once, nor did they expect to; it required a fine adjustment. But they were disappointed that they found nothing for several hours as they hovered high over the rotation. Then it came—clearly and definitely, but from quite a small location only. "Limited," said Steiner, "as though within a pale. As though there were but one city, if that is its form. Shall we follow the rest of the surface to find another, or concentrate on this? It'll be twelve hours before it's back in our ken if we let it go now." "Let's lock on this one and finish the scan. Then we can do the rest of the world to make sure we've missed nothing," said Stark. There was one more test to run, one very tricky and difficult of analysis, that with the Extraordinary Perception Locator. This was designed simply to locate a source of superior thought. But this might be so varied or so unfamiliar that often both the machine and the designer of it were puzzled as to how to read the results. The E. P. Locator had been designed by Glaser. But when the Locator had refused to read Positive when turned on the inventor himself, bad blood developed between machine and man. Glaser knew that he had extraordinary perception. He was a much honored man in his field. He told the machine so heatedly. The machine replied, with such warmth that its relays chattered, that Glaser did not have extraordinary perception; he had only ordinary perception to an extraordinary degree. There is a difference , the machine insisted. It was for this reason that Glaser used that model no more, but built others more amenable. And it was for this reason also that the owners of Little Probe had acquired the original machine so cheaply. And there was no denying that the Extraordinary Perception Locator (or Eppel) was a contrary machine. On Earth it had read Positive on a number of crack-pots, including Waxey Sax, a jazz tootler who could not even read music. But it had also read Positive on ninety per cent of the acknowledged superior minds of the Earth. In space it had been a sound guide to the unusual intelligences encountered. Yet on Suzuki-Mi it had read Positive on a two-inch-long worm, only one of them out of billions. For the countless identical worms no trace of anything at all was shown by the test. So it was with mixed expectations that Steiner locked onto the area and got a flick. He then narrowed to a smaller area (apparently one individual, though this could not be certain) and got very definite action. Eppel was busy. The machine had a touch of the ham in it, and assumed an air of importance when it ran these tests. Finally it signaled the result, the most exasperating result it ever produces: the single orange light. It was the equivalent of the shrug of the shoulders in a man. They called it the "You tell me light." So among the intelligences there was at least one that might be extraordinary, though possibly in a crackpot way. It is good to be forewarned. "Scan the remainder of the world, Steiner," said Stark, "and the rest of us will get some sleep. If you find no other spot then we will go down on that one the next time it is in position under us, in about twelve hours." "You don't want to visit any of the other areas first? Somewhere away from the thoughtful creature?" "No. The rest of the world may be dangerous. There must be a reason that thought is in one spot only. If we find no others then we will go down boldly and visit this." So they all, except Steiner, went off to their bunks then: Stark, the Captain; Gregory Gilbert, the executive officer; Wolfgang Langweilig, the engineer; Casper Craig, super-cargo, tycoon and 51% owner of the Little Probe, and F. R. Briton, S.J., a Jesuit priest who was linguist and checker champion of the craft. Dawn did not come to the moon-town. The Little Probe hovered stationary in the light and the moon-town came up under the dawn. Then the Probe went down to visit whatever was there. "There's no town," said Steiner. "Not a building. Yet we're on the track of the minds. There's nothing but a meadow and some boscage, a sort of fountain or pool, and four streams coming out of it." "Keep on towards the minds," said Stark. "They're our target." "Not a building, not two sticks or stones placed together. That looks like an Earth-type sheep there. And that looks like an Earth-lion, I'm almost afraid to say. And those two ... why, they could well be Earth-people. But with a difference. Where is that bright light coming from?" "I don't know, but they're right in the middle of it. Land here. We'll go to meet them at once. Timidity has never been an efficacious tool with us." Well, they were people. And one could only wish that all people were like them. There was a man and a woman, and they were clothed either in very bright garments or in no garments at all, but only in a very bright light. "Talk to them, Father Briton," said Stark. "You are the linguist." "Howdy," said the priest. He may or may not have been understood, but the two of them smiled at him, so he went on. "Father Briton from Philadelphia," he said, "on detached service. And you, my good man, what is your handle, your monicker, your tag?" "Ha-Adamah," said the man. "And your daughter, or niece?" It may be that the shining man frowned momentarily at this; but the woman smiled, proving that she was human. "The woman is named Hawwah," said the man. "The sheep is named sheep, the lion is named lion, the horse is named horse and the hoolock is named hoolock." "I understand. It is possible that this could go on and on. How is it that you use the English tongue?" "I have only one tongue; but it is given to us to be understood by all; by the eagle, by the squirrel, by the ass, by the English." "We happen to be bloody Yankees, but we use a borrowed tongue. You wouldn't have a drink on you for a tubful of thirsty travellers, would you?" "The fountain." "Ah—I see." But the crew all drank of the fountain to be sociable. It was water, but water that excelled, cool and with all its original bubbles like the first water ever made. "What do you make of them?" asked Stark. "Human," said Steiner. "It may even be that they are a little more than human. I don't understand that light that surrounds them. And they seem to be clothed, as it were, in dignity." "And very little else," said Father Briton, "though that light trick does serve a purpose. But I'm not sure they'd pass in Philadelphia." "Talk to them again," said Stark. "You're the linguist." "That isn't necessary here, Captain. Talk to them yourself." "Are there any other people here?" Stark asked the man. "The two of us. Man and woman." "But are there any others?" "How would there be any others? What other kind of people could there be than man and woman?" "But is there more than one man or woman?" "How could there be more than one of anything?" The captain was a little puzzled by this, but he went on doggedly: "Ha-Adamah, what do you think that we are? Are we not people?" "You are not anything till I name you. But I will name you and then you can be. You are named Captain. He is named Priest. He is named Engineer. He is named Flunky." "Thanks a lot," said Steiner. "But are we not people?" persisted Captain Stark. "No. We are the people. There are no people but two. How could there be other people?" "And the damnest thing about it," muttered Langweilig, "is, how are you going to prove him wrong? But it does give you a small feeling." "Can we have something to eat?" asked the Captain. "Pick from the trees," said Ha-Adamah, "and then it may be that you will want to sleep on the grass. Being not of human nature (which does not need sleep or rest), it may be that you require respite. But you are free to enjoy the garden and its fruits." "We will," said Captain Stark. They wandered about the place, but they were uneasy. There were the animals. The lion and lioness were enough to make one cautious, though they offered no harm. The two bears had a puzzling look, as though they wanted either to frolic with you or to mangle you. "If there are only two people here," said Casper Craig, "then it may be that the rest of the world is not dangerous at all. It looked fertile wherever we scanned it, though not so fertile as this central bit. And those rocks would bear examining." "Flecked with gold, and possibly with something else," said Stark. "A very promising site." "And everything grows here," added Steiner. "Those are Earth-fruits and I never saw finer. I've tasted the grapes and plums and pears. The figs and dates are superb, the quince is as flavorsome as a quince can be, the cherries are excellent. And I never did taste such oranges. But I haven't yet tried the—" and he stopped. "If you're thinking what I'm afraid to think," said Gilbert, "then it will be the test at least: whether we're having a pleasant dream or whether this is reality. Go ahead and eat one." "I won't be the first to eat one. You eat." "Ask him first. You ask him." "Ha-Adamah, is it allowed to eat the apples?" "Certainly. Eat. It is the finest fruit in the garden." "Well, the analogy breaks down there," said Stark. "I was almost beginning to believe in the thing. But if it isn't that, then what. Father Briton, you are the linguist, but in Hebrew does not Ha-Adamah and Hawwah mean—?" "Of course they do. You know that as well as I." "I was never a believer. But would it be possible for the exact same proposition to maintain here as on Earth?" "All things are possible." And it was then that Ha-Adamah, the shining man, gave a wild cry: "No, no. Do not approach it. It is not allowed to eat of that one!" It was the pomegranate tree, and he was warning Langweilig away from it. "Once more, Father," said Stark, "you should be the authority; but does not the idea that it was the apple that was forbidden go back only to a medieval painting?" "It does. The name of the fruit is not mentioned in Genesis. In Hebrew exegesis, however, the pomegranate is usually indicated." "I thought so. Question the man further, Father. This is too incredible." "It is a little odd. Adam, old man, how long have you been here?" "Forever less six days is the answer that has been given to me. I never did understand the answer, however." "And have you gotten no older in all that time?" "I do not understand what 'older' is. I am as I have been from the beginning." "And do you think that you will ever die?" "To die I do not understand. I am taught that it is a property of fallen nature to die, and that does not pertain to me or mine." "And are you completely happy here?" "Perfectly happy according to my preternatural state. But I am taught that it might be possible to lose that happiness, and then to seek it vainly through all the ages. I am taught that sickness and ageing and even death could come if this happiness were ever lost. I am taught that on at least one other unfortunate world it has actually been lost." "Do you consider yourself a knowledgeable man?" "Yes, since I am the only man, and knowledge is natural to man. But I am further blessed. I have a preternatural intellect." Then Stark cut in once more: "There must be some one question you could ask him, Father. Some way to settle it. I am becoming nearly convinced." "Yes, there is a question that will settle it. Adam, old man, how about a game of checkers?" "This is hardly the time for clowning," said Stark. "I'm not clowning, Captain. How about it, Adam? I'll give you choice of colors and first move." "No. It would be no contest. I have a preternatural intellect." "Well, I beat a barber who was champion of Germantown. And I beat the champion of Morgan County, Tennessee, which is the hottest checker center on Earth. I've played against, and beaten, machines. But I never played a preternatural mind. Let's just set up the board, Adam, and have a go at it." "No. It would be no contest. I would not like to humble you." They were there for three days. They were delighted with the place. It was a world with everything, and it seemed to have only two inhabitants. They went everywhere except into the big cave. "What is there, Adam?" asked Captain Stark. "The great serpent lives there. I would not disturb him. He has long been cranky because plans he had for us did not materialize. But we are taught that should ever evil come to us, which it cannot if we persevere, it will come by him." They learned no more of the real nature of the sphere in their time there. Yet all but one of them were convinced of the reality when they left. And they talked of it as they took off. "A crowd would laugh if told of it," said Stark, "but not many would laugh if they had actually seen the place, or them. I am not a gullible man, but I am convinced of this: that this is a pristine and pure world and that ours and all the others we have visited are fallen worlds. Here are the prototypes of our first parents before their fall. They are garbed in light and innocence, and they have the happiness that we have been seeking for centuries. It would be a crime if anyone disturbed that happiness." "I too am convinced," said Steiner. "It is Paradise itself, where the lion lies down with the lamb, and where the serpent has not prevailed. It would be the darkest of crimes if we or others should play the part of the serpent, and intrude and spoil." "I am probably the most skeptical man in the world," said Casper Craig the tycoon, "but I do believe my eyes. I have been there and seen it. It is indeed an unspoiled Paradise; and it would be a crime calling to the wide heavens for vengeance for anyone to smirch in any way that perfection. "So much for that. Now to business. Gilbert, take a gram: Ninety Million Square Miles of Pristine Paradise for Sale or Lease. Farming, Ranching, exceptional opportunities for Horticulture. Gold, Silver, Iron, Earth-Type Fauna. Terms. Special Rates for Large Settlement Parties. Write, Gram, or call in person at any of our planetary offices as listed below. Ask for Brochure—Eden Acres Unlimited." Down in the great cave that Old Serpent, a two-legged one among whose names were "Snake-Oil Sam," spoke to his underlings: "It'll take them fourteen days to get back with the settlers. We'll have time to overhaul the blasters. We haven't had any well-equipped settlers for six weeks. It used to be we'd hardly have time to strip and slaughter and stow before there was another batch to take care of." "I think you'd better write me some new lines," said Adam. "I feel like a goof saying those same ones to each bunch." "You are a goof, and therefore perfect for the part. I was in show business long enough to know never to change a line too soon. I did change Adam and Eve to Ha-Adamah and Hawwah, and the apple to the pomegranate. People aren't becoming any smarter—but they are becoming better researched, and they insist on authenticity. "This is still a perfect come-on here. There is something in human nature that cannot resist the idea of a Perfect Paradise. Folks will whoop and holler to their neighbors to come in droves to spoil and mar it. It isn't greed or the desire for new land so much—though that is strong too. Mainly it is the feverish passion to befoul and poison what is unspoiled. Fortunately I am sagacious enough to take advantage of this trait. And when you start to farm a new world on a shoestring you have to acquire your equipment as you can." He looked proudly around at the great cave with its mountains and tiers of materials, heavy machinery of all sorts, titanic crates of foodstuff space-sealed; wheeled, tracked, propped, vaned and jetted vehicles; and power packs to run a world. He looked at the three dozen space ships stripped and stacked, and at the rather large pile of bone-meal in one corner. "We will have to have another lion," said Eve. "Bowser is getting old, and Marie-Yvette abuses him and gnaws his toes. And we do have to have a big-maned lion to lie down with the lamb." "I know it, Eve. The lion is a very important prop. Maybe one of the crackpot settlers will bring a new lion." "And can't you mix another kind of shining paint? This itches. It's hell." "I'm working on it." Casper Craig was still dictating the gram: "Amazing quality of longevity seemingly inherent in the locale. Climate ideal. Daylight or half-light. All twenty-one hours from Planet Delphina and from Sol. Pure water for all industrial purposes. Scenic and storied. Zoning and pre-settlement restrictions to insure congenial neighbors. A completely planned globular settlement in a near arm of our own galaxy. Low taxes and liberal credit. Financing our specialty—" "And you had better have an armed escort when you return," said Father Briton. "Why in cosmos would we want an armed escort?" "It's as phony as a seven-credit note!" "You, a man of the cloth doubt it? And us ready skeptics convinced by our senses? Why do you doubt?" "It is only the unbelieving who believe so easily in obvious frauds. Theologically unsound, dramaturgically weak, philologically impossible, zoologically rigged, salted conspicuously with gold and shot through with anachronisms. And moreover he was afraid to play me at checkers." "What?" "If I have a preternatural intellect I wouldn't be afraid of a game of checkers with anyone. Yet there was an unusual mind there somewhere; it was just that he chose not to make our acquaintance personally." "They looked at the priest thoughtfully. "But it was Paradise in one way," said Steiner at last. "How?" "All the time we were there the woman did not speak."

What is the plot of the story?

1

Steiner uses several tools to determine if there is any life on a little moon that his craft hovers over. After getting some positive feedback, Steiner agrees to scan the rest of the world while his colleagues get some rest. The findings are good, so the crew decides to land. A man introduces himself as Ha-Adamah (Adam) and his female partner is named Hawwah (Eve). The man explains that he is able to speak whatever language his listener needs to hear in order to understand, and this includes animals like eagles and squirrels. Stark then asks the mostly naked man if there are other humans on the moon. Adam says there cannot be more than one of anything. He then names each member of the crew something different and explains that they cannot be people because the man and woman themselves are people. The crew members consume fruit from the garden and are incredibly surprised at their quality. The produce tastes better than anything they have ever eaten on earth. They begin to make the connections between this place and the Garden of Eden, and they wonder if they are dreaming. The man tells Langweilig he is not allowed to eat from the pomegranate tree, and the priest explains that in other languages, it is not the apple that is forbidden in the Garden of Eden, but the pomegranate. The crew members continue to silently make comparisons to the Biblical story. Adam tells the men that he has heard about another world in which the people have fallen. He also explains that he has a preternatural intellect. In order to check his claims, the priest asks Adam to play checkers, but he refuses. The crew members learn about the large serpent that lives in a nearby cave. Adam claims that if evil is to come to him, it will happen via the serpent. After leaving on their ship, all of the crew members are convinced that they have found an actual paradise, a place that has yet to be touched and has not yet fallen. They are eager to take advantage of the land’s resources and exploit the perfect conditions by selling off the land to settlers. The only person who disagrees that this Garden of Eden is real is the priest. He points out several inconsistencies and argues that Adam refused to play checkers because in reality he could not win. His skepticism convinces his colleagues that their shared experience was in fact fake. Meanwhile, Adam and Eve take off their costumes and the paint on their bodies that causes them to glow. Snake-Oil Sam comes out of his cave and the trio begins to prepare for the return of the settlers. They have done this many times before, and each time they fool a group of people, those settlers come back and Snake-Oil Sam takes everything they have and stockpiles it for himself. His motivation is to gain enough equipment and goods to start his own civilization there.

61007

IT WAS A DULL, ROUTINE LITTLE WORLD. IT DIDN'T EVEN HAVE A CITY. EVERYTHING IT HAD WAS IN THE GARDEN BY R. A. LAFFERTY [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, March 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] The protozoic recorder chirped like a bird. Not only would there be life traces on that little moon, but it would be a lively place. So they skipped several steps in the procedure. The chordata discerner read Positive over most of the surface. There was spinal fluid on that orb, rivers of it. So again they omitted several tests and went to the cognition scanner. Would it show Thought on the body? Naturally they did not get results at once, nor did they expect to; it required a fine adjustment. But they were disappointed that they found nothing for several hours as they hovered high over the rotation. Then it came—clearly and definitely, but from quite a small location only. "Limited," said Steiner, "as though within a pale. As though there were but one city, if that is its form. Shall we follow the rest of the surface to find another, or concentrate on this? It'll be twelve hours before it's back in our ken if we let it go now." "Let's lock on this one and finish the scan. Then we can do the rest of the world to make sure we've missed nothing," said Stark. There was one more test to run, one very tricky and difficult of analysis, that with the Extraordinary Perception Locator. This was designed simply to locate a source of superior thought. But this might be so varied or so unfamiliar that often both the machine and the designer of it were puzzled as to how to read the results. The E. P. Locator had been designed by Glaser. But when the Locator had refused to read Positive when turned on the inventor himself, bad blood developed between machine and man. Glaser knew that he had extraordinary perception. He was a much honored man in his field. He told the machine so heatedly. The machine replied, with such warmth that its relays chattered, that Glaser did not have extraordinary perception; he had only ordinary perception to an extraordinary degree. There is a difference , the machine insisted. It was for this reason that Glaser used that model no more, but built others more amenable. And it was for this reason also that the owners of Little Probe had acquired the original machine so cheaply. And there was no denying that the Extraordinary Perception Locator (or Eppel) was a contrary machine. On Earth it had read Positive on a number of crack-pots, including Waxey Sax, a jazz tootler who could not even read music. But it had also read Positive on ninety per cent of the acknowledged superior minds of the Earth. In space it had been a sound guide to the unusual intelligences encountered. Yet on Suzuki-Mi it had read Positive on a two-inch-long worm, only one of them out of billions. For the countless identical worms no trace of anything at all was shown by the test. So it was with mixed expectations that Steiner locked onto the area and got a flick. He then narrowed to a smaller area (apparently one individual, though this could not be certain) and got very definite action. Eppel was busy. The machine had a touch of the ham in it, and assumed an air of importance when it ran these tests. Finally it signaled the result, the most exasperating result it ever produces: the single orange light. It was the equivalent of the shrug of the shoulders in a man. They called it the "You tell me light." So among the intelligences there was at least one that might be extraordinary, though possibly in a crackpot way. It is good to be forewarned. "Scan the remainder of the world, Steiner," said Stark, "and the rest of us will get some sleep. If you find no other spot then we will go down on that one the next time it is in position under us, in about twelve hours." "You don't want to visit any of the other areas first? Somewhere away from the thoughtful creature?" "No. The rest of the world may be dangerous. There must be a reason that thought is in one spot only. If we find no others then we will go down boldly and visit this." So they all, except Steiner, went off to their bunks then: Stark, the Captain; Gregory Gilbert, the executive officer; Wolfgang Langweilig, the engineer; Casper Craig, super-cargo, tycoon and 51% owner of the Little Probe, and F. R. Briton, S.J., a Jesuit priest who was linguist and checker champion of the craft. Dawn did not come to the moon-town. The Little Probe hovered stationary in the light and the moon-town came up under the dawn. Then the Probe went down to visit whatever was there. "There's no town," said Steiner. "Not a building. Yet we're on the track of the minds. There's nothing but a meadow and some boscage, a sort of fountain or pool, and four streams coming out of it." "Keep on towards the minds," said Stark. "They're our target." "Not a building, not two sticks or stones placed together. That looks like an Earth-type sheep there. And that looks like an Earth-lion, I'm almost afraid to say. And those two ... why, they could well be Earth-people. But with a difference. Where is that bright light coming from?" "I don't know, but they're right in the middle of it. Land here. We'll go to meet them at once. Timidity has never been an efficacious tool with us." Well, they were people. And one could only wish that all people were like them. There was a man and a woman, and they were clothed either in very bright garments or in no garments at all, but only in a very bright light. "Talk to them, Father Briton," said Stark. "You are the linguist." "Howdy," said the priest. He may or may not have been understood, but the two of them smiled at him, so he went on. "Father Briton from Philadelphia," he said, "on detached service. And you, my good man, what is your handle, your monicker, your tag?" "Ha-Adamah," said the man. "And your daughter, or niece?" It may be that the shining man frowned momentarily at this; but the woman smiled, proving that she was human. "The woman is named Hawwah," said the man. "The sheep is named sheep, the lion is named lion, the horse is named horse and the hoolock is named hoolock." "I understand. It is possible that this could go on and on. How is it that you use the English tongue?" "I have only one tongue; but it is given to us to be understood by all; by the eagle, by the squirrel, by the ass, by the English." "We happen to be bloody Yankees, but we use a borrowed tongue. You wouldn't have a drink on you for a tubful of thirsty travellers, would you?" "The fountain." "Ah—I see." But the crew all drank of the fountain to be sociable. It was water, but water that excelled, cool and with all its original bubbles like the first water ever made. "What do you make of them?" asked Stark. "Human," said Steiner. "It may even be that they are a little more than human. I don't understand that light that surrounds them. And they seem to be clothed, as it were, in dignity." "And very little else," said Father Briton, "though that light trick does serve a purpose. But I'm not sure they'd pass in Philadelphia." "Talk to them again," said Stark. "You're the linguist." "That isn't necessary here, Captain. Talk to them yourself." "Are there any other people here?" Stark asked the man. "The two of us. Man and woman." "But are there any others?" "How would there be any others? What other kind of people could there be than man and woman?" "But is there more than one man or woman?" "How could there be more than one of anything?" The captain was a little puzzled by this, but he went on doggedly: "Ha-Adamah, what do you think that we are? Are we not people?" "You are not anything till I name you. But I will name you and then you can be. You are named Captain. He is named Priest. He is named Engineer. He is named Flunky." "Thanks a lot," said Steiner. "But are we not people?" persisted Captain Stark. "No. We are the people. There are no people but two. How could there be other people?" "And the damnest thing about it," muttered Langweilig, "is, how are you going to prove him wrong? But it does give you a small feeling." "Can we have something to eat?" asked the Captain. "Pick from the trees," said Ha-Adamah, "and then it may be that you will want to sleep on the grass. Being not of human nature (which does not need sleep or rest), it may be that you require respite. But you are free to enjoy the garden and its fruits." "We will," said Captain Stark. They wandered about the place, but they were uneasy. There were the animals. The lion and lioness were enough to make one cautious, though they offered no harm. The two bears had a puzzling look, as though they wanted either to frolic with you or to mangle you. "If there are only two people here," said Casper Craig, "then it may be that the rest of the world is not dangerous at all. It looked fertile wherever we scanned it, though not so fertile as this central bit. And those rocks would bear examining." "Flecked with gold, and possibly with something else," said Stark. "A very promising site." "And everything grows here," added Steiner. "Those are Earth-fruits and I never saw finer. I've tasted the grapes and plums and pears. The figs and dates are superb, the quince is as flavorsome as a quince can be, the cherries are excellent. And I never did taste such oranges. But I haven't yet tried the—" and he stopped. "If you're thinking what I'm afraid to think," said Gilbert, "then it will be the test at least: whether we're having a pleasant dream or whether this is reality. Go ahead and eat one." "I won't be the first to eat one. You eat." "Ask him first. You ask him." "Ha-Adamah, is it allowed to eat the apples?" "Certainly. Eat. It is the finest fruit in the garden." "Well, the analogy breaks down there," said Stark. "I was almost beginning to believe in the thing. But if it isn't that, then what. Father Briton, you are the linguist, but in Hebrew does not Ha-Adamah and Hawwah mean—?" "Of course they do. You know that as well as I." "I was never a believer. But would it be possible for the exact same proposition to maintain here as on Earth?" "All things are possible." And it was then that Ha-Adamah, the shining man, gave a wild cry: "No, no. Do not approach it. It is not allowed to eat of that one!" It was the pomegranate tree, and he was warning Langweilig away from it. "Once more, Father," said Stark, "you should be the authority; but does not the idea that it was the apple that was forbidden go back only to a medieval painting?" "It does. The name of the fruit is not mentioned in Genesis. In Hebrew exegesis, however, the pomegranate is usually indicated." "I thought so. Question the man further, Father. This is too incredible." "It is a little odd. Adam, old man, how long have you been here?" "Forever less six days is the answer that has been given to me. I never did understand the answer, however." "And have you gotten no older in all that time?" "I do not understand what 'older' is. I am as I have been from the beginning." "And do you think that you will ever die?" "To die I do not understand. I am taught that it is a property of fallen nature to die, and that does not pertain to me or mine." "And are you completely happy here?" "Perfectly happy according to my preternatural state. But I am taught that it might be possible to lose that happiness, and then to seek it vainly through all the ages. I am taught that sickness and ageing and even death could come if this happiness were ever lost. I am taught that on at least one other unfortunate world it has actually been lost." "Do you consider yourself a knowledgeable man?" "Yes, since I am the only man, and knowledge is natural to man. But I am further blessed. I have a preternatural intellect." Then Stark cut in once more: "There must be some one question you could ask him, Father. Some way to settle it. I am becoming nearly convinced." "Yes, there is a question that will settle it. Adam, old man, how about a game of checkers?" "This is hardly the time for clowning," said Stark. "I'm not clowning, Captain. How about it, Adam? I'll give you choice of colors and first move." "No. It would be no contest. I have a preternatural intellect." "Well, I beat a barber who was champion of Germantown. And I beat the champion of Morgan County, Tennessee, which is the hottest checker center on Earth. I've played against, and beaten, machines. But I never played a preternatural mind. Let's just set up the board, Adam, and have a go at it." "No. It would be no contest. I would not like to humble you." They were there for three days. They were delighted with the place. It was a world with everything, and it seemed to have only two inhabitants. They went everywhere except into the big cave. "What is there, Adam?" asked Captain Stark. "The great serpent lives there. I would not disturb him. He has long been cranky because plans he had for us did not materialize. But we are taught that should ever evil come to us, which it cannot if we persevere, it will come by him." They learned no more of the real nature of the sphere in their time there. Yet all but one of them were convinced of the reality when they left. And they talked of it as they took off. "A crowd would laugh if told of it," said Stark, "but not many would laugh if they had actually seen the place, or them. I am not a gullible man, but I am convinced of this: that this is a pristine and pure world and that ours and all the others we have visited are fallen worlds. Here are the prototypes of our first parents before their fall. They are garbed in light and innocence, and they have the happiness that we have been seeking for centuries. It would be a crime if anyone disturbed that happiness." "I too am convinced," said Steiner. "It is Paradise itself, where the lion lies down with the lamb, and where the serpent has not prevailed. It would be the darkest of crimes if we or others should play the part of the serpent, and intrude and spoil." "I am probably the most skeptical man in the world," said Casper Craig the tycoon, "but I do believe my eyes. I have been there and seen it. It is indeed an unspoiled Paradise; and it would be a crime calling to the wide heavens for vengeance for anyone to smirch in any way that perfection. "So much for that. Now to business. Gilbert, take a gram: Ninety Million Square Miles of Pristine Paradise for Sale or Lease. Farming, Ranching, exceptional opportunities for Horticulture. Gold, Silver, Iron, Earth-Type Fauna. Terms. Special Rates for Large Settlement Parties. Write, Gram, or call in person at any of our planetary offices as listed below. Ask for Brochure—Eden Acres Unlimited." Down in the great cave that Old Serpent, a two-legged one among whose names were "Snake-Oil Sam," spoke to his underlings: "It'll take them fourteen days to get back with the settlers. We'll have time to overhaul the blasters. We haven't had any well-equipped settlers for six weeks. It used to be we'd hardly have time to strip and slaughter and stow before there was another batch to take care of." "I think you'd better write me some new lines," said Adam. "I feel like a goof saying those same ones to each bunch." "You are a goof, and therefore perfect for the part. I was in show business long enough to know never to change a line too soon. I did change Adam and Eve to Ha-Adamah and Hawwah, and the apple to the pomegranate. People aren't becoming any smarter—but they are becoming better researched, and they insist on authenticity. "This is still a perfect come-on here. There is something in human nature that cannot resist the idea of a Perfect Paradise. Folks will whoop and holler to their neighbors to come in droves to spoil and mar it. It isn't greed or the desire for new land so much—though that is strong too. Mainly it is the feverish passion to befoul and poison what is unspoiled. Fortunately I am sagacious enough to take advantage of this trait. And when you start to farm a new world on a shoestring you have to acquire your equipment as you can." He looked proudly around at the great cave with its mountains and tiers of materials, heavy machinery of all sorts, titanic crates of foodstuff space-sealed; wheeled, tracked, propped, vaned and jetted vehicles; and power packs to run a world. He looked at the three dozen space ships stripped and stacked, and at the rather large pile of bone-meal in one corner. "We will have to have another lion," said Eve. "Bowser is getting old, and Marie-Yvette abuses him and gnaws his toes. And we do have to have a big-maned lion to lie down with the lamb." "I know it, Eve. The lion is a very important prop. Maybe one of the crackpot settlers will bring a new lion." "And can't you mix another kind of shining paint? This itches. It's hell." "I'm working on it." Casper Craig was still dictating the gram: "Amazing quality of longevity seemingly inherent in the locale. Climate ideal. Daylight or half-light. All twenty-one hours from Planet Delphina and from Sol. Pure water for all industrial purposes. Scenic and storied. Zoning and pre-settlement restrictions to insure congenial neighbors. A completely planned globular settlement in a near arm of our own galaxy. Low taxes and liberal credit. Financing our specialty—" "And you had better have an armed escort when you return," said Father Briton. "Why in cosmos would we want an armed escort?" "It's as phony as a seven-credit note!" "You, a man of the cloth doubt it? And us ready skeptics convinced by our senses? Why do you doubt?" "It is only the unbelieving who believe so easily in obvious frauds. Theologically unsound, dramaturgically weak, philologically impossible, zoologically rigged, salted conspicuously with gold and shot through with anachronisms. And moreover he was afraid to play me at checkers." "What?" "If I have a preternatural intellect I wouldn't be afraid of a game of checkers with anyone. Yet there was an unusual mind there somewhere; it was just that he chose not to make our acquaintance personally." "They looked at the priest thoughtfully. "But it was Paradise in one way," said Steiner at last. "How?" "All the time we were there the woman did not speak."

What is the plot of the story?

3

A crew of humans in a spaceship encounter a small moon that has a promising amount of life that they wish to investigate. The crew of the Little Probe is made up of a typical captain, engineer, and executive officer, but also includes a tycoon and a priest, among others. Stark, the captain, orders his man Steiner to continue running scans overnight so that the crew can land on the moon the next day. When they approach the surface, they recognize various animals that look familiar from life on Earth, including sheep and lions, but there is a bright light they don’t understand the source of. Briton, the priest, is also a linguist so he approaches the two people that they find, and is surprised when he is easily understood. The man, Ha Adamah, speaks English perfectly, and says it is due to a special character of his own language that anyone can understand him. The woman on the surface, Hawwah, does not speak while the crew is there. These two are the only humanoids that the crew notices, and they find that the bright light seems to be coming from the people themselves. The main features on the surface are a large garden and a fountain, and the crew is struck by the resemblance to the biblical story of Adam and Eve. They test the boundaries of the similarities by asking to eat apples, which they are told is fine, but then find that pomegranates are not allowed to be consumed. This does not discount the similarity, as some versions of the story say that pomegranates were the forbidden fruit, and the crew is even more baffled when they hear that there is a serpent there that is the source of evil: they do not meet him, as he is in a cave. After three days on the surface, with Father Briton asking questions all the while, the crew goes back to the Little Prob where they discuss what they had witnessed. Stark was astounded at the purity of the world, and thought it needed to be protected, as did Steiner. Craig, the tycoon who owns 51% of the probe, admitted it was beautiful and would be terrible to ruin, but immediately works on dictating a message to Gilbert, the executive officer, advertising the moon to those who might want to buy or lease land there. On the surface, Ha-Adamah and Hawwah are meeting with the Old Serpent—it turns out that the entire situation was a ploy to draw the humans in, and they regularly kill incoming settlers to take their supplies. Father Briton is the only one who is suspicious, and convinces the rest of the crew that they have to doubt what they had just experienced—besides flaws in logic, he was surprised that his offer of a checkers game had been denied, as it would have been a chance for Ha-Adamah to show off.

61007

IT WAS A DULL, ROUTINE LITTLE WORLD. IT DIDN'T EVEN HAVE A CITY. EVERYTHING IT HAD WAS IN THE GARDEN BY R. A. LAFFERTY [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, March 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] The protozoic recorder chirped like a bird. Not only would there be life traces on that little moon, but it would be a lively place. So they skipped several steps in the procedure. The chordata discerner read Positive over most of the surface. There was spinal fluid on that orb, rivers of it. So again they omitted several tests and went to the cognition scanner. Would it show Thought on the body? Naturally they did not get results at once, nor did they expect to; it required a fine adjustment. But they were disappointed that they found nothing for several hours as they hovered high over the rotation. Then it came—clearly and definitely, but from quite a small location only. "Limited," said Steiner, "as though within a pale. As though there were but one city, if that is its form. Shall we follow the rest of the surface to find another, or concentrate on this? It'll be twelve hours before it's back in our ken if we let it go now." "Let's lock on this one and finish the scan. Then we can do the rest of the world to make sure we've missed nothing," said Stark. There was one more test to run, one very tricky and difficult of analysis, that with the Extraordinary Perception Locator. This was designed simply to locate a source of superior thought. But this might be so varied or so unfamiliar that often both the machine and the designer of it were puzzled as to how to read the results. The E. P. Locator had been designed by Glaser. But when the Locator had refused to read Positive when turned on the inventor himself, bad blood developed between machine and man. Glaser knew that he had extraordinary perception. He was a much honored man in his field. He told the machine so heatedly. The machine replied, with such warmth that its relays chattered, that Glaser did not have extraordinary perception; he had only ordinary perception to an extraordinary degree. There is a difference , the machine insisted. It was for this reason that Glaser used that model no more, but built others more amenable. And it was for this reason also that the owners of Little Probe had acquired the original machine so cheaply. And there was no denying that the Extraordinary Perception Locator (or Eppel) was a contrary machine. On Earth it had read Positive on a number of crack-pots, including Waxey Sax, a jazz tootler who could not even read music. But it had also read Positive on ninety per cent of the acknowledged superior minds of the Earth. In space it had been a sound guide to the unusual intelligences encountered. Yet on Suzuki-Mi it had read Positive on a two-inch-long worm, only one of them out of billions. For the countless identical worms no trace of anything at all was shown by the test. So it was with mixed expectations that Steiner locked onto the area and got a flick. He then narrowed to a smaller area (apparently one individual, though this could not be certain) and got very definite action. Eppel was busy. The machine had a touch of the ham in it, and assumed an air of importance when it ran these tests. Finally it signaled the result, the most exasperating result it ever produces: the single orange light. It was the equivalent of the shrug of the shoulders in a man. They called it the "You tell me light." So among the intelligences there was at least one that might be extraordinary, though possibly in a crackpot way. It is good to be forewarned. "Scan the remainder of the world, Steiner," said Stark, "and the rest of us will get some sleep. If you find no other spot then we will go down on that one the next time it is in position under us, in about twelve hours." "You don't want to visit any of the other areas first? Somewhere away from the thoughtful creature?" "No. The rest of the world may be dangerous. There must be a reason that thought is in one spot only. If we find no others then we will go down boldly and visit this." So they all, except Steiner, went off to their bunks then: Stark, the Captain; Gregory Gilbert, the executive officer; Wolfgang Langweilig, the engineer; Casper Craig, super-cargo, tycoon and 51% owner of the Little Probe, and F. R. Briton, S.J., a Jesuit priest who was linguist and checker champion of the craft. Dawn did not come to the moon-town. The Little Probe hovered stationary in the light and the moon-town came up under the dawn. Then the Probe went down to visit whatever was there. "There's no town," said Steiner. "Not a building. Yet we're on the track of the minds. There's nothing but a meadow and some boscage, a sort of fountain or pool, and four streams coming out of it." "Keep on towards the minds," said Stark. "They're our target." "Not a building, not two sticks or stones placed together. That looks like an Earth-type sheep there. And that looks like an Earth-lion, I'm almost afraid to say. And those two ... why, they could well be Earth-people. But with a difference. Where is that bright light coming from?" "I don't know, but they're right in the middle of it. Land here. We'll go to meet them at once. Timidity has never been an efficacious tool with us." Well, they were people. And one could only wish that all people were like them. There was a man and a woman, and they were clothed either in very bright garments or in no garments at all, but only in a very bright light. "Talk to them, Father Briton," said Stark. "You are the linguist." "Howdy," said the priest. He may or may not have been understood, but the two of them smiled at him, so he went on. "Father Briton from Philadelphia," he said, "on detached service. And you, my good man, what is your handle, your monicker, your tag?" "Ha-Adamah," said the man. "And your daughter, or niece?" It may be that the shining man frowned momentarily at this; but the woman smiled, proving that she was human. "The woman is named Hawwah," said the man. "The sheep is named sheep, the lion is named lion, the horse is named horse and the hoolock is named hoolock." "I understand. It is possible that this could go on and on. How is it that you use the English tongue?" "I have only one tongue; but it is given to us to be understood by all; by the eagle, by the squirrel, by the ass, by the English." "We happen to be bloody Yankees, but we use a borrowed tongue. You wouldn't have a drink on you for a tubful of thirsty travellers, would you?" "The fountain." "Ah—I see." But the crew all drank of the fountain to be sociable. It was water, but water that excelled, cool and with all its original bubbles like the first water ever made. "What do you make of them?" asked Stark. "Human," said Steiner. "It may even be that they are a little more than human. I don't understand that light that surrounds them. And they seem to be clothed, as it were, in dignity." "And very little else," said Father Briton, "though that light trick does serve a purpose. But I'm not sure they'd pass in Philadelphia." "Talk to them again," said Stark. "You're the linguist." "That isn't necessary here, Captain. Talk to them yourself." "Are there any other people here?" Stark asked the man. "The two of us. Man and woman." "But are there any others?" "How would there be any others? What other kind of people could there be than man and woman?" "But is there more than one man or woman?" "How could there be more than one of anything?" The captain was a little puzzled by this, but he went on doggedly: "Ha-Adamah, what do you think that we are? Are we not people?" "You are not anything till I name you. But I will name you and then you can be. You are named Captain. He is named Priest. He is named Engineer. He is named Flunky." "Thanks a lot," said Steiner. "But are we not people?" persisted Captain Stark. "No. We are the people. There are no people but two. How could there be other people?" "And the damnest thing about it," muttered Langweilig, "is, how are you going to prove him wrong? But it does give you a small feeling." "Can we have something to eat?" asked the Captain. "Pick from the trees," said Ha-Adamah, "and then it may be that you will want to sleep on the grass. Being not of human nature (which does not need sleep or rest), it may be that you require respite. But you are free to enjoy the garden and its fruits." "We will," said Captain Stark. They wandered about the place, but they were uneasy. There were the animals. The lion and lioness were enough to make one cautious, though they offered no harm. The two bears had a puzzling look, as though they wanted either to frolic with you or to mangle you. "If there are only two people here," said Casper Craig, "then it may be that the rest of the world is not dangerous at all. It looked fertile wherever we scanned it, though not so fertile as this central bit. And those rocks would bear examining." "Flecked with gold, and possibly with something else," said Stark. "A very promising site." "And everything grows here," added Steiner. "Those are Earth-fruits and I never saw finer. I've tasted the grapes and plums and pears. The figs and dates are superb, the quince is as flavorsome as a quince can be, the cherries are excellent. And I never did taste such oranges. But I haven't yet tried the—" and he stopped. "If you're thinking what I'm afraid to think," said Gilbert, "then it will be the test at least: whether we're having a pleasant dream or whether this is reality. Go ahead and eat one." "I won't be the first to eat one. You eat." "Ask him first. You ask him." "Ha-Adamah, is it allowed to eat the apples?" "Certainly. Eat. It is the finest fruit in the garden." "Well, the analogy breaks down there," said Stark. "I was almost beginning to believe in the thing. But if it isn't that, then what. Father Briton, you are the linguist, but in Hebrew does not Ha-Adamah and Hawwah mean—?" "Of course they do. You know that as well as I." "I was never a believer. But would it be possible for the exact same proposition to maintain here as on Earth?" "All things are possible." And it was then that Ha-Adamah, the shining man, gave a wild cry: "No, no. Do not approach it. It is not allowed to eat of that one!" It was the pomegranate tree, and he was warning Langweilig away from it. "Once more, Father," said Stark, "you should be the authority; but does not the idea that it was the apple that was forbidden go back only to a medieval painting?" "It does. The name of the fruit is not mentioned in Genesis. In Hebrew exegesis, however, the pomegranate is usually indicated." "I thought so. Question the man further, Father. This is too incredible." "It is a little odd. Adam, old man, how long have you been here?" "Forever less six days is the answer that has been given to me. I never did understand the answer, however." "And have you gotten no older in all that time?" "I do not understand what 'older' is. I am as I have been from the beginning." "And do you think that you will ever die?" "To die I do not understand. I am taught that it is a property of fallen nature to die, and that does not pertain to me or mine." "And are you completely happy here?" "Perfectly happy according to my preternatural state. But I am taught that it might be possible to lose that happiness, and then to seek it vainly through all the ages. I am taught that sickness and ageing and even death could come if this happiness were ever lost. I am taught that on at least one other unfortunate world it has actually been lost." "Do you consider yourself a knowledgeable man?" "Yes, since I am the only man, and knowledge is natural to man. But I am further blessed. I have a preternatural intellect." Then Stark cut in once more: "There must be some one question you could ask him, Father. Some way to settle it. I am becoming nearly convinced." "Yes, there is a question that will settle it. Adam, old man, how about a game of checkers?" "This is hardly the time for clowning," said Stark. "I'm not clowning, Captain. How about it, Adam? I'll give you choice of colors and first move." "No. It would be no contest. I have a preternatural intellect." "Well, I beat a barber who was champion of Germantown. And I beat the champion of Morgan County, Tennessee, which is the hottest checker center on Earth. I've played against, and beaten, machines. But I never played a preternatural mind. Let's just set up the board, Adam, and have a go at it." "No. It would be no contest. I would not like to humble you." They were there for three days. They were delighted with the place. It was a world with everything, and it seemed to have only two inhabitants. They went everywhere except into the big cave. "What is there, Adam?" asked Captain Stark. "The great serpent lives there. I would not disturb him. He has long been cranky because plans he had for us did not materialize. But we are taught that should ever evil come to us, which it cannot if we persevere, it will come by him." They learned no more of the real nature of the sphere in their time there. Yet all but one of them were convinced of the reality when they left. And they talked of it as they took off. "A crowd would laugh if told of it," said Stark, "but not many would laugh if they had actually seen the place, or them. I am not a gullible man, but I am convinced of this: that this is a pristine and pure world and that ours and all the others we have visited are fallen worlds. Here are the prototypes of our first parents before their fall. They are garbed in light and innocence, and they have the happiness that we have been seeking for centuries. It would be a crime if anyone disturbed that happiness." "I too am convinced," said Steiner. "It is Paradise itself, where the lion lies down with the lamb, and where the serpent has not prevailed. It would be the darkest of crimes if we or others should play the part of the serpent, and intrude and spoil." "I am probably the most skeptical man in the world," said Casper Craig the tycoon, "but I do believe my eyes. I have been there and seen it. It is indeed an unspoiled Paradise; and it would be a crime calling to the wide heavens for vengeance for anyone to smirch in any way that perfection. "So much for that. Now to business. Gilbert, take a gram: Ninety Million Square Miles of Pristine Paradise for Sale or Lease. Farming, Ranching, exceptional opportunities for Horticulture. Gold, Silver, Iron, Earth-Type Fauna. Terms. Special Rates for Large Settlement Parties. Write, Gram, or call in person at any of our planetary offices as listed below. Ask for Brochure—Eden Acres Unlimited." Down in the great cave that Old Serpent, a two-legged one among whose names were "Snake-Oil Sam," spoke to his underlings: "It'll take them fourteen days to get back with the settlers. We'll have time to overhaul the blasters. We haven't had any well-equipped settlers for six weeks. It used to be we'd hardly have time to strip and slaughter and stow before there was another batch to take care of." "I think you'd better write me some new lines," said Adam. "I feel like a goof saying those same ones to each bunch." "You are a goof, and therefore perfect for the part. I was in show business long enough to know never to change a line too soon. I did change Adam and Eve to Ha-Adamah and Hawwah, and the apple to the pomegranate. People aren't becoming any smarter—but they are becoming better researched, and they insist on authenticity. "This is still a perfect come-on here. There is something in human nature that cannot resist the idea of a Perfect Paradise. Folks will whoop and holler to their neighbors to come in droves to spoil and mar it. It isn't greed or the desire for new land so much—though that is strong too. Mainly it is the feverish passion to befoul and poison what is unspoiled. Fortunately I am sagacious enough to take advantage of this trait. And when you start to farm a new world on a shoestring you have to acquire your equipment as you can." He looked proudly around at the great cave with its mountains and tiers of materials, heavy machinery of all sorts, titanic crates of foodstuff space-sealed; wheeled, tracked, propped, vaned and jetted vehicles; and power packs to run a world. He looked at the three dozen space ships stripped and stacked, and at the rather large pile of bone-meal in one corner. "We will have to have another lion," said Eve. "Bowser is getting old, and Marie-Yvette abuses him and gnaws his toes. And we do have to have a big-maned lion to lie down with the lamb." "I know it, Eve. The lion is a very important prop. Maybe one of the crackpot settlers will bring a new lion." "And can't you mix another kind of shining paint? This itches. It's hell." "I'm working on it." Casper Craig was still dictating the gram: "Amazing quality of longevity seemingly inherent in the locale. Climate ideal. Daylight or half-light. All twenty-one hours from Planet Delphina and from Sol. Pure water for all industrial purposes. Scenic and storied. Zoning and pre-settlement restrictions to insure congenial neighbors. A completely planned globular settlement in a near arm of our own galaxy. Low taxes and liberal credit. Financing our specialty—" "And you had better have an armed escort when you return," said Father Briton. "Why in cosmos would we want an armed escort?" "It's as phony as a seven-credit note!" "You, a man of the cloth doubt it? And us ready skeptics convinced by our senses? Why do you doubt?" "It is only the unbelieving who believe so easily in obvious frauds. Theologically unsound, dramaturgically weak, philologically impossible, zoologically rigged, salted conspicuously with gold and shot through with anachronisms. And moreover he was afraid to play me at checkers." "What?" "If I have a preternatural intellect I wouldn't be afraid of a game of checkers with anyone. Yet there was an unusual mind there somewhere; it was just that he chose not to make our acquaintance personally." "They looked at the priest thoughtfully. "But it was Paradise in one way," said Steiner at last. "How?" "All the time we were there the woman did not speak."

What is the plot of the story?

6

A crew of six find themselves in outer space, searching for their next mission. Steiner, one man on board, uses a machine to read the planet below, searching for life. The reader comes back positive, so they move on to the next test. The eppel reports an orange light, meaning the possibility of something extraordinary, but perhaps not.The eppel (the Extraordinary Perception Locator) was created with the intention to find the most extraordinary people, brains, or trains of thought. Stark, the captain, takes charge and demands they scan the rest of the planet for traces of infrastructure. He sends the rest of the crew to bed, and when they wake up the next morning, the report is back. Negative. They target the possibility of something extraordinary, as reported by the eppel, and make their way to the surface. As they land, they take note of their surroundings. No shelters, buildings, or lean-tos. Just land with a lion and a lamb. They spot two people, neither naked nor clothed but bathed in light, and ask Father Briton, the Jesuit priest and resident linguist, to communicate with them. He approaches them, talking in English, and the man, Ha-Adamah, replies. He introduces himself and the woman, named Hawwah. Father Briton asks him a few questions about their surroundings and names, and the Man responds with convoluted answers. He points the crew towards the fountain, so they may quench their thirst. Although hesitant at first, the men soon realize this water is the best they’ve ever had: the freshest, bubbliest, and clearest. Their suspicions about this place and the Man and Woman only grow. The Captain attempts to question Ha-Adamah, and his answers confirm their suspicions. This place might be Paradise or Eden, the place where humanity was born and disgraced. Ha-Adamah welcomes them and offers the fruit on the trees to eat, except for the pomegranates. Ha-Adamah reveals that he is happy here, but that he has been warned that he may lose this happiness and lead the rest of his life desperately trying to find it again. The Man also shies away from the cave where he says the great and evil serpent lives. The crew, now convinced, leave this land and call it in. Selling it as paradise perfect for ranching, farming, camping, or other industrial uses, they plot their return with settlers to take over the land. Only Father Briton believes paradise is not paradise at all, simply a trick. The story flashes back to the surface, where Hawwah and Ha-Adamah are huddling with the Serpent, Snake-Oil Sam. It is revealed that they pretend to be Adam and Eve to draw in settlers, only to steal their equipment and kill them. The Serpent congratulates them on their work, but reminds them that more is to be done in order to farm this new world and get all the equipment they need. On the spaceship, Father Briton asks for an armed escort to accompany them. The others laugh him off.

61007

IT WAS A DULL, ROUTINE LITTLE WORLD. IT DIDN'T EVEN HAVE A CITY. EVERYTHING IT HAD WAS IN THE GARDEN BY R. A. LAFFERTY [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, March 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] The protozoic recorder chirped like a bird. Not only would there be life traces on that little moon, but it would be a lively place. So they skipped several steps in the procedure. The chordata discerner read Positive over most of the surface. There was spinal fluid on that orb, rivers of it. So again they omitted several tests and went to the cognition scanner. Would it show Thought on the body? Naturally they did not get results at once, nor did they expect to; it required a fine adjustment. But they were disappointed that they found nothing for several hours as they hovered high over the rotation. Then it came—clearly and definitely, but from quite a small location only. "Limited," said Steiner, "as though within a pale. As though there were but one city, if that is its form. Shall we follow the rest of the surface to find another, or concentrate on this? It'll be twelve hours before it's back in our ken if we let it go now." "Let's lock on this one and finish the scan. Then we can do the rest of the world to make sure we've missed nothing," said Stark. There was one more test to run, one very tricky and difficult of analysis, that with the Extraordinary Perception Locator. This was designed simply to locate a source of superior thought. But this might be so varied or so unfamiliar that often both the machine and the designer of it were puzzled as to how to read the results. The E. P. Locator had been designed by Glaser. But when the Locator had refused to read Positive when turned on the inventor himself, bad blood developed between machine and man. Glaser knew that he had extraordinary perception. He was a much honored man in his field. He told the machine so heatedly. The machine replied, with such warmth that its relays chattered, that Glaser did not have extraordinary perception; he had only ordinary perception to an extraordinary degree. There is a difference , the machine insisted. It was for this reason that Glaser used that model no more, but built others more amenable. And it was for this reason also that the owners of Little Probe had acquired the original machine so cheaply. And there was no denying that the Extraordinary Perception Locator (or Eppel) was a contrary machine. On Earth it had read Positive on a number of crack-pots, including Waxey Sax, a jazz tootler who could not even read music. But it had also read Positive on ninety per cent of the acknowledged superior minds of the Earth. In space it had been a sound guide to the unusual intelligences encountered. Yet on Suzuki-Mi it had read Positive on a two-inch-long worm, only one of them out of billions. For the countless identical worms no trace of anything at all was shown by the test. So it was with mixed expectations that Steiner locked onto the area and got a flick. He then narrowed to a smaller area (apparently one individual, though this could not be certain) and got very definite action. Eppel was busy. The machine had a touch of the ham in it, and assumed an air of importance when it ran these tests. Finally it signaled the result, the most exasperating result it ever produces: the single orange light. It was the equivalent of the shrug of the shoulders in a man. They called it the "You tell me light." So among the intelligences there was at least one that might be extraordinary, though possibly in a crackpot way. It is good to be forewarned. "Scan the remainder of the world, Steiner," said Stark, "and the rest of us will get some sleep. If you find no other spot then we will go down on that one the next time it is in position under us, in about twelve hours." "You don't want to visit any of the other areas first? Somewhere away from the thoughtful creature?" "No. The rest of the world may be dangerous. There must be a reason that thought is in one spot only. If we find no others then we will go down boldly and visit this." So they all, except Steiner, went off to their bunks then: Stark, the Captain; Gregory Gilbert, the executive officer; Wolfgang Langweilig, the engineer; Casper Craig, super-cargo, tycoon and 51% owner of the Little Probe, and F. R. Briton, S.J., a Jesuit priest who was linguist and checker champion of the craft. Dawn did not come to the moon-town. The Little Probe hovered stationary in the light and the moon-town came up under the dawn. Then the Probe went down to visit whatever was there. "There's no town," said Steiner. "Not a building. Yet we're on the track of the minds. There's nothing but a meadow and some boscage, a sort of fountain or pool, and four streams coming out of it." "Keep on towards the minds," said Stark. "They're our target." "Not a building, not two sticks or stones placed together. That looks like an Earth-type sheep there. And that looks like an Earth-lion, I'm almost afraid to say. And those two ... why, they could well be Earth-people. But with a difference. Where is that bright light coming from?" "I don't know, but they're right in the middle of it. Land here. We'll go to meet them at once. Timidity has never been an efficacious tool with us." Well, they were people. And one could only wish that all people were like them. There was a man and a woman, and they were clothed either in very bright garments or in no garments at all, but only in a very bright light. "Talk to them, Father Briton," said Stark. "You are the linguist." "Howdy," said the priest. He may or may not have been understood, but the two of them smiled at him, so he went on. "Father Briton from Philadelphia," he said, "on detached service. And you, my good man, what is your handle, your monicker, your tag?" "Ha-Adamah," said the man. "And your daughter, or niece?" It may be that the shining man frowned momentarily at this; but the woman smiled, proving that she was human. "The woman is named Hawwah," said the man. "The sheep is named sheep, the lion is named lion, the horse is named horse and the hoolock is named hoolock." "I understand. It is possible that this could go on and on. How is it that you use the English tongue?" "I have only one tongue; but it is given to us to be understood by all; by the eagle, by the squirrel, by the ass, by the English." "We happen to be bloody Yankees, but we use a borrowed tongue. You wouldn't have a drink on you for a tubful of thirsty travellers, would you?" "The fountain." "Ah—I see." But the crew all drank of the fountain to be sociable. It was water, but water that excelled, cool and with all its original bubbles like the first water ever made. "What do you make of them?" asked Stark. "Human," said Steiner. "It may even be that they are a little more than human. I don't understand that light that surrounds them. And they seem to be clothed, as it were, in dignity." "And very little else," said Father Briton, "though that light trick does serve a purpose. But I'm not sure they'd pass in Philadelphia." "Talk to them again," said Stark. "You're the linguist." "That isn't necessary here, Captain. Talk to them yourself." "Are there any other people here?" Stark asked the man. "The two of us. Man and woman." "But are there any others?" "How would there be any others? What other kind of people could there be than man and woman?" "But is there more than one man or woman?" "How could there be more than one of anything?" The captain was a little puzzled by this, but he went on doggedly: "Ha-Adamah, what do you think that we are? Are we not people?" "You are not anything till I name you. But I will name you and then you can be. You are named Captain. He is named Priest. He is named Engineer. He is named Flunky." "Thanks a lot," said Steiner. "But are we not people?" persisted Captain Stark. "No. We are the people. There are no people but two. How could there be other people?" "And the damnest thing about it," muttered Langweilig, "is, how are you going to prove him wrong? But it does give you a small feeling." "Can we have something to eat?" asked the Captain. "Pick from the trees," said Ha-Adamah, "and then it may be that you will want to sleep on the grass. Being not of human nature (which does not need sleep or rest), it may be that you require respite. But you are free to enjoy the garden and its fruits." "We will," said Captain Stark. They wandered about the place, but they were uneasy. There were the animals. The lion and lioness were enough to make one cautious, though they offered no harm. The two bears had a puzzling look, as though they wanted either to frolic with you or to mangle you. "If there are only two people here," said Casper Craig, "then it may be that the rest of the world is not dangerous at all. It looked fertile wherever we scanned it, though not so fertile as this central bit. And those rocks would bear examining." "Flecked with gold, and possibly with something else," said Stark. "A very promising site." "And everything grows here," added Steiner. "Those are Earth-fruits and I never saw finer. I've tasted the grapes and plums and pears. The figs and dates are superb, the quince is as flavorsome as a quince can be, the cherries are excellent. And I never did taste such oranges. But I haven't yet tried the—" and he stopped. "If you're thinking what I'm afraid to think," said Gilbert, "then it will be the test at least: whether we're having a pleasant dream or whether this is reality. Go ahead and eat one." "I won't be the first to eat one. You eat." "Ask him first. You ask him." "Ha-Adamah, is it allowed to eat the apples?" "Certainly. Eat. It is the finest fruit in the garden." "Well, the analogy breaks down there," said Stark. "I was almost beginning to believe in the thing. But if it isn't that, then what. Father Briton, you are the linguist, but in Hebrew does not Ha-Adamah and Hawwah mean—?" "Of course they do. You know that as well as I." "I was never a believer. But would it be possible for the exact same proposition to maintain here as on Earth?" "All things are possible." And it was then that Ha-Adamah, the shining man, gave a wild cry: "No, no. Do not approach it. It is not allowed to eat of that one!" It was the pomegranate tree, and he was warning Langweilig away from it. "Once more, Father," said Stark, "you should be the authority; but does not the idea that it was the apple that was forbidden go back only to a medieval painting?" "It does. The name of the fruit is not mentioned in Genesis. In Hebrew exegesis, however, the pomegranate is usually indicated." "I thought so. Question the man further, Father. This is too incredible." "It is a little odd. Adam, old man, how long have you been here?" "Forever less six days is the answer that has been given to me. I never did understand the answer, however." "And have you gotten no older in all that time?" "I do not understand what 'older' is. I am as I have been from the beginning." "And do you think that you will ever die?" "To die I do not understand. I am taught that it is a property of fallen nature to die, and that does not pertain to me or mine." "And are you completely happy here?" "Perfectly happy according to my preternatural state. But I am taught that it might be possible to lose that happiness, and then to seek it vainly through all the ages. I am taught that sickness and ageing and even death could come if this happiness were ever lost. I am taught that on at least one other unfortunate world it has actually been lost." "Do you consider yourself a knowledgeable man?" "Yes, since I am the only man, and knowledge is natural to man. But I am further blessed. I have a preternatural intellect." Then Stark cut in once more: "There must be some one question you could ask him, Father. Some way to settle it. I am becoming nearly convinced." "Yes, there is a question that will settle it. Adam, old man, how about a game of checkers?" "This is hardly the time for clowning," said Stark. "I'm not clowning, Captain. How about it, Adam? I'll give you choice of colors and first move." "No. It would be no contest. I have a preternatural intellect." "Well, I beat a barber who was champion of Germantown. And I beat the champion of Morgan County, Tennessee, which is the hottest checker center on Earth. I've played against, and beaten, machines. But I never played a preternatural mind. Let's just set up the board, Adam, and have a go at it." "No. It would be no contest. I would not like to humble you." They were there for three days. They were delighted with the place. It was a world with everything, and it seemed to have only two inhabitants. They went everywhere except into the big cave. "What is there, Adam?" asked Captain Stark. "The great serpent lives there. I would not disturb him. He has long been cranky because plans he had for us did not materialize. But we are taught that should ever evil come to us, which it cannot if we persevere, it will come by him." They learned no more of the real nature of the sphere in their time there. Yet all but one of them were convinced of the reality when they left. And they talked of it as they took off. "A crowd would laugh if told of it," said Stark, "but not many would laugh if they had actually seen the place, or them. I am not a gullible man, but I am convinced of this: that this is a pristine and pure world and that ours and all the others we have visited are fallen worlds. Here are the prototypes of our first parents before their fall. They are garbed in light and innocence, and they have the happiness that we have been seeking for centuries. It would be a crime if anyone disturbed that happiness." "I too am convinced," said Steiner. "It is Paradise itself, where the lion lies down with the lamb, and where the serpent has not prevailed. It would be the darkest of crimes if we or others should play the part of the serpent, and intrude and spoil." "I am probably the most skeptical man in the world," said Casper Craig the tycoon, "but I do believe my eyes. I have been there and seen it. It is indeed an unspoiled Paradise; and it would be a crime calling to the wide heavens for vengeance for anyone to smirch in any way that perfection. "So much for that. Now to business. Gilbert, take a gram: Ninety Million Square Miles of Pristine Paradise for Sale or Lease. Farming, Ranching, exceptional opportunities for Horticulture. Gold, Silver, Iron, Earth-Type Fauna. Terms. Special Rates for Large Settlement Parties. Write, Gram, or call in person at any of our planetary offices as listed below. Ask for Brochure—Eden Acres Unlimited." Down in the great cave that Old Serpent, a two-legged one among whose names were "Snake-Oil Sam," spoke to his underlings: "It'll take them fourteen days to get back with the settlers. We'll have time to overhaul the blasters. We haven't had any well-equipped settlers for six weeks. It used to be we'd hardly have time to strip and slaughter and stow before there was another batch to take care of." "I think you'd better write me some new lines," said Adam. "I feel like a goof saying those same ones to each bunch." "You are a goof, and therefore perfect for the part. I was in show business long enough to know never to change a line too soon. I did change Adam and Eve to Ha-Adamah and Hawwah, and the apple to the pomegranate. People aren't becoming any smarter—but they are becoming better researched, and they insist on authenticity. "This is still a perfect come-on here. There is something in human nature that cannot resist the idea of a Perfect Paradise. Folks will whoop and holler to their neighbors to come in droves to spoil and mar it. It isn't greed or the desire for new land so much—though that is strong too. Mainly it is the feverish passion to befoul and poison what is unspoiled. Fortunately I am sagacious enough to take advantage of this trait. And when you start to farm a new world on a shoestring you have to acquire your equipment as you can." He looked proudly around at the great cave with its mountains and tiers of materials, heavy machinery of all sorts, titanic crates of foodstuff space-sealed; wheeled, tracked, propped, vaned and jetted vehicles; and power packs to run a world. He looked at the three dozen space ships stripped and stacked, and at the rather large pile of bone-meal in one corner. "We will have to have another lion," said Eve. "Bowser is getting old, and Marie-Yvette abuses him and gnaws his toes. And we do have to have a big-maned lion to lie down with the lamb." "I know it, Eve. The lion is a very important prop. Maybe one of the crackpot settlers will bring a new lion." "And can't you mix another kind of shining paint? This itches. It's hell." "I'm working on it." Casper Craig was still dictating the gram: "Amazing quality of longevity seemingly inherent in the locale. Climate ideal. Daylight or half-light. All twenty-one hours from Planet Delphina and from Sol. Pure water for all industrial purposes. Scenic and storied. Zoning and pre-settlement restrictions to insure congenial neighbors. A completely planned globular settlement in a near arm of our own galaxy. Low taxes and liberal credit. Financing our specialty—" "And you had better have an armed escort when you return," said Father Briton. "Why in cosmos would we want an armed escort?" "It's as phony as a seven-credit note!" "You, a man of the cloth doubt it? And us ready skeptics convinced by our senses? Why do you doubt?" "It is only the unbelieving who believe so easily in obvious frauds. Theologically unsound, dramaturgically weak, philologically impossible, zoologically rigged, salted conspicuously with gold and shot through with anachronisms. And moreover he was afraid to play me at checkers." "What?" "If I have a preternatural intellect I wouldn't be afraid of a game of checkers with anyone. Yet there was an unusual mind there somewhere; it was just that he chose not to make our acquaintance personally." "They looked at the priest thoughtfully. "But it was Paradise in one way," said Steiner at last. "How?" "All the time we were there the woman did not speak."

Describe the story's characters and how they interact.

5

There are two main groups of characters: the crew of the Little Probe and the inhabitants of the “Garden” world. The crew of the Little Probe consist of Stark, the captain; Gilbert, the executive officer; Steiner, a generall crewmember “flunky”; Langweilig, the engineer; Craig, a businessman and part-owner of the ship; and Fr. Briton, priest, linguist, and checkers afficionado. Stark is the leader of the group, commanding the others to their various tasks. Craig is shown to be a shrewd entrepreneur who is most intent on reaping potential profit from the situation they find themselves in. On the moon lives Ha-Adamah and Hawwah who present themselves as archetypes of the biblical Adam and Eve. In reality, they are settlers, attempting to gather supplies to farm this world by stealing supplies from other settlers that they entice to world and then ambush. They are commanded by Snake-Oil Sam, a cynical, former showbusiness professional who runs the con. The two groups interact when the crew descends to the surface of the moon. Ha-Adamah describes his environment in casual but bewildering terms to his visitors. Briton, as a Catholic priest, is designated by the crew to be Ha-Adamah’s main interlocutor. Hawwah, notedly does not speak at all—a flourish to attempt to further depict the attractiveness of the world to their all-male visitors. The crew beside Briton are enamored by the environment of the moon and are totally taken in by the performance of their hosts. The story concludes with Briton chiding his crewmates for their gullibility. Although Briton perhaps had the most reason to believe the moon was divinely ordained, he saw through the charade without much difficulty.

61007

IT WAS A DULL, ROUTINE LITTLE WORLD. IT DIDN'T EVEN HAVE A CITY. EVERYTHING IT HAD WAS IN THE GARDEN BY R. A. LAFFERTY [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, March 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] The protozoic recorder chirped like a bird. Not only would there be life traces on that little moon, but it would be a lively place. So they skipped several steps in the procedure. The chordata discerner read Positive over most of the surface. There was spinal fluid on that orb, rivers of it. So again they omitted several tests and went to the cognition scanner. Would it show Thought on the body? Naturally they did not get results at once, nor did they expect to; it required a fine adjustment. But they were disappointed that they found nothing for several hours as they hovered high over the rotation. Then it came—clearly and definitely, but from quite a small location only. "Limited," said Steiner, "as though within a pale. As though there were but one city, if that is its form. Shall we follow the rest of the surface to find another, or concentrate on this? It'll be twelve hours before it's back in our ken if we let it go now." "Let's lock on this one and finish the scan. Then we can do the rest of the world to make sure we've missed nothing," said Stark. There was one more test to run, one very tricky and difficult of analysis, that with the Extraordinary Perception Locator. This was designed simply to locate a source of superior thought. But this might be so varied or so unfamiliar that often both the machine and the designer of it were puzzled as to how to read the results. The E. P. Locator had been designed by Glaser. But when the Locator had refused to read Positive when turned on the inventor himself, bad blood developed between machine and man. Glaser knew that he had extraordinary perception. He was a much honored man in his field. He told the machine so heatedly. The machine replied, with such warmth that its relays chattered, that Glaser did not have extraordinary perception; he had only ordinary perception to an extraordinary degree. There is a difference , the machine insisted. It was for this reason that Glaser used that model no more, but built others more amenable. And it was for this reason also that the owners of Little Probe had acquired the original machine so cheaply. And there was no denying that the Extraordinary Perception Locator (or Eppel) was a contrary machine. On Earth it had read Positive on a number of crack-pots, including Waxey Sax, a jazz tootler who could not even read music. But it had also read Positive on ninety per cent of the acknowledged superior minds of the Earth. In space it had been a sound guide to the unusual intelligences encountered. Yet on Suzuki-Mi it had read Positive on a two-inch-long worm, only one of them out of billions. For the countless identical worms no trace of anything at all was shown by the test. So it was with mixed expectations that Steiner locked onto the area and got a flick. He then narrowed to a smaller area (apparently one individual, though this could not be certain) and got very definite action. Eppel was busy. The machine had a touch of the ham in it, and assumed an air of importance when it ran these tests. Finally it signaled the result, the most exasperating result it ever produces: the single orange light. It was the equivalent of the shrug of the shoulders in a man. They called it the "You tell me light." So among the intelligences there was at least one that might be extraordinary, though possibly in a crackpot way. It is good to be forewarned. "Scan the remainder of the world, Steiner," said Stark, "and the rest of us will get some sleep. If you find no other spot then we will go down on that one the next time it is in position under us, in about twelve hours." "You don't want to visit any of the other areas first? Somewhere away from the thoughtful creature?" "No. The rest of the world may be dangerous. There must be a reason that thought is in one spot only. If we find no others then we will go down boldly and visit this." So they all, except Steiner, went off to their bunks then: Stark, the Captain; Gregory Gilbert, the executive officer; Wolfgang Langweilig, the engineer; Casper Craig, super-cargo, tycoon and 51% owner of the Little Probe, and F. R. Briton, S.J., a Jesuit priest who was linguist and checker champion of the craft. Dawn did not come to the moon-town. The Little Probe hovered stationary in the light and the moon-town came up under the dawn. Then the Probe went down to visit whatever was there. "There's no town," said Steiner. "Not a building. Yet we're on the track of the minds. There's nothing but a meadow and some boscage, a sort of fountain or pool, and four streams coming out of it." "Keep on towards the minds," said Stark. "They're our target." "Not a building, not two sticks or stones placed together. That looks like an Earth-type sheep there. And that looks like an Earth-lion, I'm almost afraid to say. And those two ... why, they could well be Earth-people. But with a difference. Where is that bright light coming from?" "I don't know, but they're right in the middle of it. Land here. We'll go to meet them at once. Timidity has never been an efficacious tool with us." Well, they were people. And one could only wish that all people were like them. There was a man and a woman, and they were clothed either in very bright garments or in no garments at all, but only in a very bright light. "Talk to them, Father Briton," said Stark. "You are the linguist." "Howdy," said the priest. He may or may not have been understood, but the two of them smiled at him, so he went on. "Father Briton from Philadelphia," he said, "on detached service. And you, my good man, what is your handle, your monicker, your tag?" "Ha-Adamah," said the man. "And your daughter, or niece?" It may be that the shining man frowned momentarily at this; but the woman smiled, proving that she was human. "The woman is named Hawwah," said the man. "The sheep is named sheep, the lion is named lion, the horse is named horse and the hoolock is named hoolock." "I understand. It is possible that this could go on and on. How is it that you use the English tongue?" "I have only one tongue; but it is given to us to be understood by all; by the eagle, by the squirrel, by the ass, by the English." "We happen to be bloody Yankees, but we use a borrowed tongue. You wouldn't have a drink on you for a tubful of thirsty travellers, would you?" "The fountain." "Ah—I see." But the crew all drank of the fountain to be sociable. It was water, but water that excelled, cool and with all its original bubbles like the first water ever made. "What do you make of them?" asked Stark. "Human," said Steiner. "It may even be that they are a little more than human. I don't understand that light that surrounds them. And they seem to be clothed, as it were, in dignity." "And very little else," said Father Briton, "though that light trick does serve a purpose. But I'm not sure they'd pass in Philadelphia." "Talk to them again," said Stark. "You're the linguist." "That isn't necessary here, Captain. Talk to them yourself." "Are there any other people here?" Stark asked the man. "The two of us. Man and woman." "But are there any others?" "How would there be any others? What other kind of people could there be than man and woman?" "But is there more than one man or woman?" "How could there be more than one of anything?" The captain was a little puzzled by this, but he went on doggedly: "Ha-Adamah, what do you think that we are? Are we not people?" "You are not anything till I name you. But I will name you and then you can be. You are named Captain. He is named Priest. He is named Engineer. He is named Flunky." "Thanks a lot," said Steiner. "But are we not people?" persisted Captain Stark. "No. We are the people. There are no people but two. How could there be other people?" "And the damnest thing about it," muttered Langweilig, "is, how are you going to prove him wrong? But it does give you a small feeling." "Can we have something to eat?" asked the Captain. "Pick from the trees," said Ha-Adamah, "and then it may be that you will want to sleep on the grass. Being not of human nature (which does not need sleep or rest), it may be that you require respite. But you are free to enjoy the garden and its fruits." "We will," said Captain Stark. They wandered about the place, but they were uneasy. There were the animals. The lion and lioness were enough to make one cautious, though they offered no harm. The two bears had a puzzling look, as though they wanted either to frolic with you or to mangle you. "If there are only two people here," said Casper Craig, "then it may be that the rest of the world is not dangerous at all. It looked fertile wherever we scanned it, though not so fertile as this central bit. And those rocks would bear examining." "Flecked with gold, and possibly with something else," said Stark. "A very promising site." "And everything grows here," added Steiner. "Those are Earth-fruits and I never saw finer. I've tasted the grapes and plums and pears. The figs and dates are superb, the quince is as flavorsome as a quince can be, the cherries are excellent. And I never did taste such oranges. But I haven't yet tried the—" and he stopped. "If you're thinking what I'm afraid to think," said Gilbert, "then it will be the test at least: whether we're having a pleasant dream or whether this is reality. Go ahead and eat one." "I won't be the first to eat one. You eat." "Ask him first. You ask him." "Ha-Adamah, is it allowed to eat the apples?" "Certainly. Eat. It is the finest fruit in the garden." "Well, the analogy breaks down there," said Stark. "I was almost beginning to believe in the thing. But if it isn't that, then what. Father Briton, you are the linguist, but in Hebrew does not Ha-Adamah and Hawwah mean—?" "Of course they do. You know that as well as I." "I was never a believer. But would it be possible for the exact same proposition to maintain here as on Earth?" "All things are possible." And it was then that Ha-Adamah, the shining man, gave a wild cry: "No, no. Do not approach it. It is not allowed to eat of that one!" It was the pomegranate tree, and he was warning Langweilig away from it. "Once more, Father," said Stark, "you should be the authority; but does not the idea that it was the apple that was forbidden go back only to a medieval painting?" "It does. The name of the fruit is not mentioned in Genesis. In Hebrew exegesis, however, the pomegranate is usually indicated." "I thought so. Question the man further, Father. This is too incredible." "It is a little odd. Adam, old man, how long have you been here?" "Forever less six days is the answer that has been given to me. I never did understand the answer, however." "And have you gotten no older in all that time?" "I do not understand what 'older' is. I am as I have been from the beginning." "And do you think that you will ever die?" "To die I do not understand. I am taught that it is a property of fallen nature to die, and that does not pertain to me or mine." "And are you completely happy here?" "Perfectly happy according to my preternatural state. But I am taught that it might be possible to lose that happiness, and then to seek it vainly through all the ages. I am taught that sickness and ageing and even death could come if this happiness were ever lost. I am taught that on at least one other unfortunate world it has actually been lost." "Do you consider yourself a knowledgeable man?" "Yes, since I am the only man, and knowledge is natural to man. But I am further blessed. I have a preternatural intellect." Then Stark cut in once more: "There must be some one question you could ask him, Father. Some way to settle it. I am becoming nearly convinced." "Yes, there is a question that will settle it. Adam, old man, how about a game of checkers?" "This is hardly the time for clowning," said Stark. "I'm not clowning, Captain. How about it, Adam? I'll give you choice of colors and first move." "No. It would be no contest. I have a preternatural intellect." "Well, I beat a barber who was champion of Germantown. And I beat the champion of Morgan County, Tennessee, which is the hottest checker center on Earth. I've played against, and beaten, machines. But I never played a preternatural mind. Let's just set up the board, Adam, and have a go at it." "No. It would be no contest. I would not like to humble you." They were there for three days. They were delighted with the place. It was a world with everything, and it seemed to have only two inhabitants. They went everywhere except into the big cave. "What is there, Adam?" asked Captain Stark. "The great serpent lives there. I would not disturb him. He has long been cranky because plans he had for us did not materialize. But we are taught that should ever evil come to us, which it cannot if we persevere, it will come by him." They learned no more of the real nature of the sphere in their time there. Yet all but one of them were convinced of the reality when they left. And they talked of it as they took off. "A crowd would laugh if told of it," said Stark, "but not many would laugh if they had actually seen the place, or them. I am not a gullible man, but I am convinced of this: that this is a pristine and pure world and that ours and all the others we have visited are fallen worlds. Here are the prototypes of our first parents before their fall. They are garbed in light and innocence, and they have the happiness that we have been seeking for centuries. It would be a crime if anyone disturbed that happiness." "I too am convinced," said Steiner. "It is Paradise itself, where the lion lies down with the lamb, and where the serpent has not prevailed. It would be the darkest of crimes if we or others should play the part of the serpent, and intrude and spoil." "I am probably the most skeptical man in the world," said Casper Craig the tycoon, "but I do believe my eyes. I have been there and seen it. It is indeed an unspoiled Paradise; and it would be a crime calling to the wide heavens for vengeance for anyone to smirch in any way that perfection. "So much for that. Now to business. Gilbert, take a gram: Ninety Million Square Miles of Pristine Paradise for Sale or Lease. Farming, Ranching, exceptional opportunities for Horticulture. Gold, Silver, Iron, Earth-Type Fauna. Terms. Special Rates for Large Settlement Parties. Write, Gram, or call in person at any of our planetary offices as listed below. Ask for Brochure—Eden Acres Unlimited." Down in the great cave that Old Serpent, a two-legged one among whose names were "Snake-Oil Sam," spoke to his underlings: "It'll take them fourteen days to get back with the settlers. We'll have time to overhaul the blasters. We haven't had any well-equipped settlers for six weeks. It used to be we'd hardly have time to strip and slaughter and stow before there was another batch to take care of." "I think you'd better write me some new lines," said Adam. "I feel like a goof saying those same ones to each bunch." "You are a goof, and therefore perfect for the part. I was in show business long enough to know never to change a line too soon. I did change Adam and Eve to Ha-Adamah and Hawwah, and the apple to the pomegranate. People aren't becoming any smarter—but they are becoming better researched, and they insist on authenticity. "This is still a perfect come-on here. There is something in human nature that cannot resist the idea of a Perfect Paradise. Folks will whoop and holler to their neighbors to come in droves to spoil and mar it. It isn't greed or the desire for new land so much—though that is strong too. Mainly it is the feverish passion to befoul and poison what is unspoiled. Fortunately I am sagacious enough to take advantage of this trait. And when you start to farm a new world on a shoestring you have to acquire your equipment as you can." He looked proudly around at the great cave with its mountains and tiers of materials, heavy machinery of all sorts, titanic crates of foodstuff space-sealed; wheeled, tracked, propped, vaned and jetted vehicles; and power packs to run a world. He looked at the three dozen space ships stripped and stacked, and at the rather large pile of bone-meal in one corner. "We will have to have another lion," said Eve. "Bowser is getting old, and Marie-Yvette abuses him and gnaws his toes. And we do have to have a big-maned lion to lie down with the lamb." "I know it, Eve. The lion is a very important prop. Maybe one of the crackpot settlers will bring a new lion." "And can't you mix another kind of shining paint? This itches. It's hell." "I'm working on it." Casper Craig was still dictating the gram: "Amazing quality of longevity seemingly inherent in the locale. Climate ideal. Daylight or half-light. All twenty-one hours from Planet Delphina and from Sol. Pure water for all industrial purposes. Scenic and storied. Zoning and pre-settlement restrictions to insure congenial neighbors. A completely planned globular settlement in a near arm of our own galaxy. Low taxes and liberal credit. Financing our specialty—" "And you had better have an armed escort when you return," said Father Briton. "Why in cosmos would we want an armed escort?" "It's as phony as a seven-credit note!" "You, a man of the cloth doubt it? And us ready skeptics convinced by our senses? Why do you doubt?" "It is only the unbelieving who believe so easily in obvious frauds. Theologically unsound, dramaturgically weak, philologically impossible, zoologically rigged, salted conspicuously with gold and shot through with anachronisms. And moreover he was afraid to play me at checkers." "What?" "If I have a preternatural intellect I wouldn't be afraid of a game of checkers with anyone. Yet there was an unusual mind there somewhere; it was just that he chose not to make our acquaintance personally." "They looked at the priest thoughtfully. "But it was Paradise in one way," said Steiner at last. "How?" "All the time we were there the woman did not speak."

Describe the story's characters and how they interact.

1

There are two different groups of characters at play in the story. The crew members who land on the new world represent one group, and Adam, Eve, and Snake-Oil Sam represent the other. The second group is nearly able to convince the first group that the moon is an untouched world, almost identical to the Garden of Eden. The crew members spend several days with Adam and Eve, and their elaborate ruse convinces them that Adam and Eve know nothing of death or suffering or ageing. It is only the priest that recognizes that the entire interaction was a con. As soon as the crew members leave, Snake-Oil Sam comes out of his cave to give Adam and Eve more directions. He is in charge of the entire sham, and he gives out orders. Sam recognizes that people simply can’t resist ruining something that appears to be perfect. He has played this game before, and he knows that the crew members will be back with others to try and take over what they see as a paradise. Instead, he will murder them and take their goods to use for his own advantage.

61007

IT WAS A DULL, ROUTINE LITTLE WORLD. IT DIDN'T EVEN HAVE A CITY. EVERYTHING IT HAD WAS IN THE GARDEN BY R. A. LAFFERTY [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, March 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] The protozoic recorder chirped like a bird. Not only would there be life traces on that little moon, but it would be a lively place. So they skipped several steps in the procedure. The chordata discerner read Positive over most of the surface. There was spinal fluid on that orb, rivers of it. So again they omitted several tests and went to the cognition scanner. Would it show Thought on the body? Naturally they did not get results at once, nor did they expect to; it required a fine adjustment. But they were disappointed that they found nothing for several hours as they hovered high over the rotation. Then it came—clearly and definitely, but from quite a small location only. "Limited," said Steiner, "as though within a pale. As though there were but one city, if that is its form. Shall we follow the rest of the surface to find another, or concentrate on this? It'll be twelve hours before it's back in our ken if we let it go now." "Let's lock on this one and finish the scan. Then we can do the rest of the world to make sure we've missed nothing," said Stark. There was one more test to run, one very tricky and difficult of analysis, that with the Extraordinary Perception Locator. This was designed simply to locate a source of superior thought. But this might be so varied or so unfamiliar that often both the machine and the designer of it were puzzled as to how to read the results. The E. P. Locator had been designed by Glaser. But when the Locator had refused to read Positive when turned on the inventor himself, bad blood developed between machine and man. Glaser knew that he had extraordinary perception. He was a much honored man in his field. He told the machine so heatedly. The machine replied, with such warmth that its relays chattered, that Glaser did not have extraordinary perception; he had only ordinary perception to an extraordinary degree. There is a difference , the machine insisted. It was for this reason that Glaser used that model no more, but built others more amenable. And it was for this reason also that the owners of Little Probe had acquired the original machine so cheaply. And there was no denying that the Extraordinary Perception Locator (or Eppel) was a contrary machine. On Earth it had read Positive on a number of crack-pots, including Waxey Sax, a jazz tootler who could not even read music. But it had also read Positive on ninety per cent of the acknowledged superior minds of the Earth. In space it had been a sound guide to the unusual intelligences encountered. Yet on Suzuki-Mi it had read Positive on a two-inch-long worm, only one of them out of billions. For the countless identical worms no trace of anything at all was shown by the test. So it was with mixed expectations that Steiner locked onto the area and got a flick. He then narrowed to a smaller area (apparently one individual, though this could not be certain) and got very definite action. Eppel was busy. The machine had a touch of the ham in it, and assumed an air of importance when it ran these tests. Finally it signaled the result, the most exasperating result it ever produces: the single orange light. It was the equivalent of the shrug of the shoulders in a man. They called it the "You tell me light." So among the intelligences there was at least one that might be extraordinary, though possibly in a crackpot way. It is good to be forewarned. "Scan the remainder of the world, Steiner," said Stark, "and the rest of us will get some sleep. If you find no other spot then we will go down on that one the next time it is in position under us, in about twelve hours." "You don't want to visit any of the other areas first? Somewhere away from the thoughtful creature?" "No. The rest of the world may be dangerous. There must be a reason that thought is in one spot only. If we find no others then we will go down boldly and visit this." So they all, except Steiner, went off to their bunks then: Stark, the Captain; Gregory Gilbert, the executive officer; Wolfgang Langweilig, the engineer; Casper Craig, super-cargo, tycoon and 51% owner of the Little Probe, and F. R. Briton, S.J., a Jesuit priest who was linguist and checker champion of the craft. Dawn did not come to the moon-town. The Little Probe hovered stationary in the light and the moon-town came up under the dawn. Then the Probe went down to visit whatever was there. "There's no town," said Steiner. "Not a building. Yet we're on the track of the minds. There's nothing but a meadow and some boscage, a sort of fountain or pool, and four streams coming out of it." "Keep on towards the minds," said Stark. "They're our target." "Not a building, not two sticks or stones placed together. That looks like an Earth-type sheep there. And that looks like an Earth-lion, I'm almost afraid to say. And those two ... why, they could well be Earth-people. But with a difference. Where is that bright light coming from?" "I don't know, but they're right in the middle of it. Land here. We'll go to meet them at once. Timidity has never been an efficacious tool with us." Well, they were people. And one could only wish that all people were like them. There was a man and a woman, and they were clothed either in very bright garments or in no garments at all, but only in a very bright light. "Talk to them, Father Briton," said Stark. "You are the linguist." "Howdy," said the priest. He may or may not have been understood, but the two of them smiled at him, so he went on. "Father Briton from Philadelphia," he said, "on detached service. And you, my good man, what is your handle, your monicker, your tag?" "Ha-Adamah," said the man. "And your daughter, or niece?" It may be that the shining man frowned momentarily at this; but the woman smiled, proving that she was human. "The woman is named Hawwah," said the man. "The sheep is named sheep, the lion is named lion, the horse is named horse and the hoolock is named hoolock." "I understand. It is possible that this could go on and on. How is it that you use the English tongue?" "I have only one tongue; but it is given to us to be understood by all; by the eagle, by the squirrel, by the ass, by the English." "We happen to be bloody Yankees, but we use a borrowed tongue. You wouldn't have a drink on you for a tubful of thirsty travellers, would you?" "The fountain." "Ah—I see." But the crew all drank of the fountain to be sociable. It was water, but water that excelled, cool and with all its original bubbles like the first water ever made. "What do you make of them?" asked Stark. "Human," said Steiner. "It may even be that they are a little more than human. I don't understand that light that surrounds them. And they seem to be clothed, as it were, in dignity." "And very little else," said Father Briton, "though that light trick does serve a purpose. But I'm not sure they'd pass in Philadelphia." "Talk to them again," said Stark. "You're the linguist." "That isn't necessary here, Captain. Talk to them yourself." "Are there any other people here?" Stark asked the man. "The two of us. Man and woman." "But are there any others?" "How would there be any others? What other kind of people could there be than man and woman?" "But is there more than one man or woman?" "How could there be more than one of anything?" The captain was a little puzzled by this, but he went on doggedly: "Ha-Adamah, what do you think that we are? Are we not people?" "You are not anything till I name you. But I will name you and then you can be. You are named Captain. He is named Priest. He is named Engineer. He is named Flunky." "Thanks a lot," said Steiner. "But are we not people?" persisted Captain Stark. "No. We are the people. There are no people but two. How could there be other people?" "And the damnest thing about it," muttered Langweilig, "is, how are you going to prove him wrong? But it does give you a small feeling." "Can we have something to eat?" asked the Captain. "Pick from the trees," said Ha-Adamah, "and then it may be that you will want to sleep on the grass. Being not of human nature (which does not need sleep or rest), it may be that you require respite. But you are free to enjoy the garden and its fruits." "We will," said Captain Stark. They wandered about the place, but they were uneasy. There were the animals. The lion and lioness were enough to make one cautious, though they offered no harm. The two bears had a puzzling look, as though they wanted either to frolic with you or to mangle you. "If there are only two people here," said Casper Craig, "then it may be that the rest of the world is not dangerous at all. It looked fertile wherever we scanned it, though not so fertile as this central bit. And those rocks would bear examining." "Flecked with gold, and possibly with something else," said Stark. "A very promising site." "And everything grows here," added Steiner. "Those are Earth-fruits and I never saw finer. I've tasted the grapes and plums and pears. The figs and dates are superb, the quince is as flavorsome as a quince can be, the cherries are excellent. And I never did taste such oranges. But I haven't yet tried the—" and he stopped. "If you're thinking what I'm afraid to think," said Gilbert, "then it will be the test at least: whether we're having a pleasant dream or whether this is reality. Go ahead and eat one." "I won't be the first to eat one. You eat." "Ask him first. You ask him." "Ha-Adamah, is it allowed to eat the apples?" "Certainly. Eat. It is the finest fruit in the garden." "Well, the analogy breaks down there," said Stark. "I was almost beginning to believe in the thing. But if it isn't that, then what. Father Briton, you are the linguist, but in Hebrew does not Ha-Adamah and Hawwah mean—?" "Of course they do. You know that as well as I." "I was never a believer. But would it be possible for the exact same proposition to maintain here as on Earth?" "All things are possible." And it was then that Ha-Adamah, the shining man, gave a wild cry: "No, no. Do not approach it. It is not allowed to eat of that one!" It was the pomegranate tree, and he was warning Langweilig away from it. "Once more, Father," said Stark, "you should be the authority; but does not the idea that it was the apple that was forbidden go back only to a medieval painting?" "It does. The name of the fruit is not mentioned in Genesis. In Hebrew exegesis, however, the pomegranate is usually indicated." "I thought so. Question the man further, Father. This is too incredible." "It is a little odd. Adam, old man, how long have you been here?" "Forever less six days is the answer that has been given to me. I never did understand the answer, however." "And have you gotten no older in all that time?" "I do not understand what 'older' is. I am as I have been from the beginning." "And do you think that you will ever die?" "To die I do not understand. I am taught that it is a property of fallen nature to die, and that does not pertain to me or mine." "And are you completely happy here?" "Perfectly happy according to my preternatural state. But I am taught that it might be possible to lose that happiness, and then to seek it vainly through all the ages. I am taught that sickness and ageing and even death could come if this happiness were ever lost. I am taught that on at least one other unfortunate world it has actually been lost." "Do you consider yourself a knowledgeable man?" "Yes, since I am the only man, and knowledge is natural to man. But I am further blessed. I have a preternatural intellect." Then Stark cut in once more: "There must be some one question you could ask him, Father. Some way to settle it. I am becoming nearly convinced." "Yes, there is a question that will settle it. Adam, old man, how about a game of checkers?" "This is hardly the time for clowning," said Stark. "I'm not clowning, Captain. How about it, Adam? I'll give you choice of colors and first move." "No. It would be no contest. I have a preternatural intellect." "Well, I beat a barber who was champion of Germantown. And I beat the champion of Morgan County, Tennessee, which is the hottest checker center on Earth. I've played against, and beaten, machines. But I never played a preternatural mind. Let's just set up the board, Adam, and have a go at it." "No. It would be no contest. I would not like to humble you." They were there for three days. They were delighted with the place. It was a world with everything, and it seemed to have only two inhabitants. They went everywhere except into the big cave. "What is there, Adam?" asked Captain Stark. "The great serpent lives there. I would not disturb him. He has long been cranky because plans he had for us did not materialize. But we are taught that should ever evil come to us, which it cannot if we persevere, it will come by him." They learned no more of the real nature of the sphere in their time there. Yet all but one of them were convinced of the reality when they left. And they talked of it as they took off. "A crowd would laugh if told of it," said Stark, "but not many would laugh if they had actually seen the place, or them. I am not a gullible man, but I am convinced of this: that this is a pristine and pure world and that ours and all the others we have visited are fallen worlds. Here are the prototypes of our first parents before their fall. They are garbed in light and innocence, and they have the happiness that we have been seeking for centuries. It would be a crime if anyone disturbed that happiness." "I too am convinced," said Steiner. "It is Paradise itself, where the lion lies down with the lamb, and where the serpent has not prevailed. It would be the darkest of crimes if we or others should play the part of the serpent, and intrude and spoil." "I am probably the most skeptical man in the world," said Casper Craig the tycoon, "but I do believe my eyes. I have been there and seen it. It is indeed an unspoiled Paradise; and it would be a crime calling to the wide heavens for vengeance for anyone to smirch in any way that perfection. "So much for that. Now to business. Gilbert, take a gram: Ninety Million Square Miles of Pristine Paradise for Sale or Lease. Farming, Ranching, exceptional opportunities for Horticulture. Gold, Silver, Iron, Earth-Type Fauna. Terms. Special Rates for Large Settlement Parties. Write, Gram, or call in person at any of our planetary offices as listed below. Ask for Brochure—Eden Acres Unlimited." Down in the great cave that Old Serpent, a two-legged one among whose names were "Snake-Oil Sam," spoke to his underlings: "It'll take them fourteen days to get back with the settlers. We'll have time to overhaul the blasters. We haven't had any well-equipped settlers for six weeks. It used to be we'd hardly have time to strip and slaughter and stow before there was another batch to take care of." "I think you'd better write me some new lines," said Adam. "I feel like a goof saying those same ones to each bunch." "You are a goof, and therefore perfect for the part. I was in show business long enough to know never to change a line too soon. I did change Adam and Eve to Ha-Adamah and Hawwah, and the apple to the pomegranate. People aren't becoming any smarter—but they are becoming better researched, and they insist on authenticity. "This is still a perfect come-on here. There is something in human nature that cannot resist the idea of a Perfect Paradise. Folks will whoop and holler to their neighbors to come in droves to spoil and mar it. It isn't greed or the desire for new land so much—though that is strong too. Mainly it is the feverish passion to befoul and poison what is unspoiled. Fortunately I am sagacious enough to take advantage of this trait. And when you start to farm a new world on a shoestring you have to acquire your equipment as you can." He looked proudly around at the great cave with its mountains and tiers of materials, heavy machinery of all sorts, titanic crates of foodstuff space-sealed; wheeled, tracked, propped, vaned and jetted vehicles; and power packs to run a world. He looked at the three dozen space ships stripped and stacked, and at the rather large pile of bone-meal in one corner. "We will have to have another lion," said Eve. "Bowser is getting old, and Marie-Yvette abuses him and gnaws his toes. And we do have to have a big-maned lion to lie down with the lamb." "I know it, Eve. The lion is a very important prop. Maybe one of the crackpot settlers will bring a new lion." "And can't you mix another kind of shining paint? This itches. It's hell." "I'm working on it." Casper Craig was still dictating the gram: "Amazing quality of longevity seemingly inherent in the locale. Climate ideal. Daylight or half-light. All twenty-one hours from Planet Delphina and from Sol. Pure water for all industrial purposes. Scenic and storied. Zoning and pre-settlement restrictions to insure congenial neighbors. A completely planned globular settlement in a near arm of our own galaxy. Low taxes and liberal credit. Financing our specialty—" "And you had better have an armed escort when you return," said Father Briton. "Why in cosmos would we want an armed escort?" "It's as phony as a seven-credit note!" "You, a man of the cloth doubt it? And us ready skeptics convinced by our senses? Why do you doubt?" "It is only the unbelieving who believe so easily in obvious frauds. Theologically unsound, dramaturgically weak, philologically impossible, zoologically rigged, salted conspicuously with gold and shot through with anachronisms. And moreover he was afraid to play me at checkers." "What?" "If I have a preternatural intellect I wouldn't be afraid of a game of checkers with anyone. Yet there was an unusual mind there somewhere; it was just that he chose not to make our acquaintance personally." "They looked at the priest thoughtfully. "But it was Paradise in one way," said Steiner at last. "How?" "All the time we were there the woman did not speak."

Describe the story's characters and how they interact.

3

The story’s characters fall into two groups: the crew of the Little Probe, and those who live on the surface of the small moon that the Little Probe goes to investigate. The crew consists of six Americans: Stark is the ship’s captain, so he calls all of shots onboard and asks a lot of questions on the surface. Steiner is his right-hand man, who tends to follow what Stark says and runs a lot of scans. Gilbert is the executive officer, who points out that they have to eat an apple to truly test if this reality is indeed the biblical paradise it appears to be, and Langweilig is the ship’s engineer. Craig is the tycoon who owns most of the ship, and wants to rent out land on the moon, and Briton is the priest and linguist who initiates contact on the surface and remains a skeptic throughout the story, eventually convincing the rest of the crew that the whole thing is a trap. On the surface, there are three characters of interest: the Old Serpent, who the reader finds out at the end of the story is in charge of the deception, and the two people known as Ha-Adamah and Hawwah. Ha-Adamah, or Adam, is the one who interacts with the ship’s crew when they visit the surface, and Hawwah, or Eve, does not talk to them while they are there—she does talk, though, and works on the plan with the serpent at the end. It is the serpent who creates the paint that makes Adam and Eve glow as if they are sources of light themselves, and writes the script for the deception.

61007

IT WAS A DULL, ROUTINE LITTLE WORLD. IT DIDN'T EVEN HAVE A CITY. EVERYTHING IT HAD WAS IN THE GARDEN BY R. A. LAFFERTY [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, March 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] The protozoic recorder chirped like a bird. Not only would there be life traces on that little moon, but it would be a lively place. So they skipped several steps in the procedure. The chordata discerner read Positive over most of the surface. There was spinal fluid on that orb, rivers of it. So again they omitted several tests and went to the cognition scanner. Would it show Thought on the body? Naturally they did not get results at once, nor did they expect to; it required a fine adjustment. But they were disappointed that they found nothing for several hours as they hovered high over the rotation. Then it came—clearly and definitely, but from quite a small location only. "Limited," said Steiner, "as though within a pale. As though there were but one city, if that is its form. Shall we follow the rest of the surface to find another, or concentrate on this? It'll be twelve hours before it's back in our ken if we let it go now." "Let's lock on this one and finish the scan. Then we can do the rest of the world to make sure we've missed nothing," said Stark. There was one more test to run, one very tricky and difficult of analysis, that with the Extraordinary Perception Locator. This was designed simply to locate a source of superior thought. But this might be so varied or so unfamiliar that often both the machine and the designer of it were puzzled as to how to read the results. The E. P. Locator had been designed by Glaser. But when the Locator had refused to read Positive when turned on the inventor himself, bad blood developed between machine and man. Glaser knew that he had extraordinary perception. He was a much honored man in his field. He told the machine so heatedly. The machine replied, with such warmth that its relays chattered, that Glaser did not have extraordinary perception; he had only ordinary perception to an extraordinary degree. There is a difference , the machine insisted. It was for this reason that Glaser used that model no more, but built others more amenable. And it was for this reason also that the owners of Little Probe had acquired the original machine so cheaply. And there was no denying that the Extraordinary Perception Locator (or Eppel) was a contrary machine. On Earth it had read Positive on a number of crack-pots, including Waxey Sax, a jazz tootler who could not even read music. But it had also read Positive on ninety per cent of the acknowledged superior minds of the Earth. In space it had been a sound guide to the unusual intelligences encountered. Yet on Suzuki-Mi it had read Positive on a two-inch-long worm, only one of them out of billions. For the countless identical worms no trace of anything at all was shown by the test. So it was with mixed expectations that Steiner locked onto the area and got a flick. He then narrowed to a smaller area (apparently one individual, though this could not be certain) and got very definite action. Eppel was busy. The machine had a touch of the ham in it, and assumed an air of importance when it ran these tests. Finally it signaled the result, the most exasperating result it ever produces: the single orange light. It was the equivalent of the shrug of the shoulders in a man. They called it the "You tell me light." So among the intelligences there was at least one that might be extraordinary, though possibly in a crackpot way. It is good to be forewarned. "Scan the remainder of the world, Steiner," said Stark, "and the rest of us will get some sleep. If you find no other spot then we will go down on that one the next time it is in position under us, in about twelve hours." "You don't want to visit any of the other areas first? Somewhere away from the thoughtful creature?" "No. The rest of the world may be dangerous. There must be a reason that thought is in one spot only. If we find no others then we will go down boldly and visit this." So they all, except Steiner, went off to their bunks then: Stark, the Captain; Gregory Gilbert, the executive officer; Wolfgang Langweilig, the engineer; Casper Craig, super-cargo, tycoon and 51% owner of the Little Probe, and F. R. Briton, S.J., a Jesuit priest who was linguist and checker champion of the craft. Dawn did not come to the moon-town. The Little Probe hovered stationary in the light and the moon-town came up under the dawn. Then the Probe went down to visit whatever was there. "There's no town," said Steiner. "Not a building. Yet we're on the track of the minds. There's nothing but a meadow and some boscage, a sort of fountain or pool, and four streams coming out of it." "Keep on towards the minds," said Stark. "They're our target." "Not a building, not two sticks or stones placed together. That looks like an Earth-type sheep there. And that looks like an Earth-lion, I'm almost afraid to say. And those two ... why, they could well be Earth-people. But with a difference. Where is that bright light coming from?" "I don't know, but they're right in the middle of it. Land here. We'll go to meet them at once. Timidity has never been an efficacious tool with us." Well, they were people. And one could only wish that all people were like them. There was a man and a woman, and they were clothed either in very bright garments or in no garments at all, but only in a very bright light. "Talk to them, Father Briton," said Stark. "You are the linguist." "Howdy," said the priest. He may or may not have been understood, but the two of them smiled at him, so he went on. "Father Briton from Philadelphia," he said, "on detached service. And you, my good man, what is your handle, your monicker, your tag?" "Ha-Adamah," said the man. "And your daughter, or niece?" It may be that the shining man frowned momentarily at this; but the woman smiled, proving that she was human. "The woman is named Hawwah," said the man. "The sheep is named sheep, the lion is named lion, the horse is named horse and the hoolock is named hoolock." "I understand. It is possible that this could go on and on. How is it that you use the English tongue?" "I have only one tongue; but it is given to us to be understood by all; by the eagle, by the squirrel, by the ass, by the English." "We happen to be bloody Yankees, but we use a borrowed tongue. You wouldn't have a drink on you for a tubful of thirsty travellers, would you?" "The fountain." "Ah—I see." But the crew all drank of the fountain to be sociable. It was water, but water that excelled, cool and with all its original bubbles like the first water ever made. "What do you make of them?" asked Stark. "Human," said Steiner. "It may even be that they are a little more than human. I don't understand that light that surrounds them. And they seem to be clothed, as it were, in dignity." "And very little else," said Father Briton, "though that light trick does serve a purpose. But I'm not sure they'd pass in Philadelphia." "Talk to them again," said Stark. "You're the linguist." "That isn't necessary here, Captain. Talk to them yourself." "Are there any other people here?" Stark asked the man. "The two of us. Man and woman." "But are there any others?" "How would there be any others? What other kind of people could there be than man and woman?" "But is there more than one man or woman?" "How could there be more than one of anything?" The captain was a little puzzled by this, but he went on doggedly: "Ha-Adamah, what do you think that we are? Are we not people?" "You are not anything till I name you. But I will name you and then you can be. You are named Captain. He is named Priest. He is named Engineer. He is named Flunky." "Thanks a lot," said Steiner. "But are we not people?" persisted Captain Stark. "No. We are the people. There are no people but two. How could there be other people?" "And the damnest thing about it," muttered Langweilig, "is, how are you going to prove him wrong? But it does give you a small feeling." "Can we have something to eat?" asked the Captain. "Pick from the trees," said Ha-Adamah, "and then it may be that you will want to sleep on the grass. Being not of human nature (which does not need sleep or rest), it may be that you require respite. But you are free to enjoy the garden and its fruits." "We will," said Captain Stark. They wandered about the place, but they were uneasy. There were the animals. The lion and lioness were enough to make one cautious, though they offered no harm. The two bears had a puzzling look, as though they wanted either to frolic with you or to mangle you. "If there are only two people here," said Casper Craig, "then it may be that the rest of the world is not dangerous at all. It looked fertile wherever we scanned it, though not so fertile as this central bit. And those rocks would bear examining." "Flecked with gold, and possibly with something else," said Stark. "A very promising site." "And everything grows here," added Steiner. "Those are Earth-fruits and I never saw finer. I've tasted the grapes and plums and pears. The figs and dates are superb, the quince is as flavorsome as a quince can be, the cherries are excellent. And I never did taste such oranges. But I haven't yet tried the—" and he stopped. "If you're thinking what I'm afraid to think," said Gilbert, "then it will be the test at least: whether we're having a pleasant dream or whether this is reality. Go ahead and eat one." "I won't be the first to eat one. You eat." "Ask him first. You ask him." "Ha-Adamah, is it allowed to eat the apples?" "Certainly. Eat. It is the finest fruit in the garden." "Well, the analogy breaks down there," said Stark. "I was almost beginning to believe in the thing. But if it isn't that, then what. Father Briton, you are the linguist, but in Hebrew does not Ha-Adamah and Hawwah mean—?" "Of course they do. You know that as well as I." "I was never a believer. But would it be possible for the exact same proposition to maintain here as on Earth?" "All things are possible." And it was then that Ha-Adamah, the shining man, gave a wild cry: "No, no. Do not approach it. It is not allowed to eat of that one!" It was the pomegranate tree, and he was warning Langweilig away from it. "Once more, Father," said Stark, "you should be the authority; but does not the idea that it was the apple that was forbidden go back only to a medieval painting?" "It does. The name of the fruit is not mentioned in Genesis. In Hebrew exegesis, however, the pomegranate is usually indicated." "I thought so. Question the man further, Father. This is too incredible." "It is a little odd. Adam, old man, how long have you been here?" "Forever less six days is the answer that has been given to me. I never did understand the answer, however." "And have you gotten no older in all that time?" "I do not understand what 'older' is. I am as I have been from the beginning." "And do you think that you will ever die?" "To die I do not understand. I am taught that it is a property of fallen nature to die, and that does not pertain to me or mine." "And are you completely happy here?" "Perfectly happy according to my preternatural state. But I am taught that it might be possible to lose that happiness, and then to seek it vainly through all the ages. I am taught that sickness and ageing and even death could come if this happiness were ever lost. I am taught that on at least one other unfortunate world it has actually been lost." "Do you consider yourself a knowledgeable man?" "Yes, since I am the only man, and knowledge is natural to man. But I am further blessed. I have a preternatural intellect." Then Stark cut in once more: "There must be some one question you could ask him, Father. Some way to settle it. I am becoming nearly convinced." "Yes, there is a question that will settle it. Adam, old man, how about a game of checkers?" "This is hardly the time for clowning," said Stark. "I'm not clowning, Captain. How about it, Adam? I'll give you choice of colors and first move." "No. It would be no contest. I have a preternatural intellect." "Well, I beat a barber who was champion of Germantown. And I beat the champion of Morgan County, Tennessee, which is the hottest checker center on Earth. I've played against, and beaten, machines. But I never played a preternatural mind. Let's just set up the board, Adam, and have a go at it." "No. It would be no contest. I would not like to humble you." They were there for three days. They were delighted with the place. It was a world with everything, and it seemed to have only two inhabitants. They went everywhere except into the big cave. "What is there, Adam?" asked Captain Stark. "The great serpent lives there. I would not disturb him. He has long been cranky because plans he had for us did not materialize. But we are taught that should ever evil come to us, which it cannot if we persevere, it will come by him." They learned no more of the real nature of the sphere in their time there. Yet all but one of them were convinced of the reality when they left. And they talked of it as they took off. "A crowd would laugh if told of it," said Stark, "but not many would laugh if they had actually seen the place, or them. I am not a gullible man, but I am convinced of this: that this is a pristine and pure world and that ours and all the others we have visited are fallen worlds. Here are the prototypes of our first parents before their fall. They are garbed in light and innocence, and they have the happiness that we have been seeking for centuries. It would be a crime if anyone disturbed that happiness." "I too am convinced," said Steiner. "It is Paradise itself, where the lion lies down with the lamb, and where the serpent has not prevailed. It would be the darkest of crimes if we or others should play the part of the serpent, and intrude and spoil." "I am probably the most skeptical man in the world," said Casper Craig the tycoon, "but I do believe my eyes. I have been there and seen it. It is indeed an unspoiled Paradise; and it would be a crime calling to the wide heavens for vengeance for anyone to smirch in any way that perfection. "So much for that. Now to business. Gilbert, take a gram: Ninety Million Square Miles of Pristine Paradise for Sale or Lease. Farming, Ranching, exceptional opportunities for Horticulture. Gold, Silver, Iron, Earth-Type Fauna. Terms. Special Rates for Large Settlement Parties. Write, Gram, or call in person at any of our planetary offices as listed below. Ask for Brochure—Eden Acres Unlimited." Down in the great cave that Old Serpent, a two-legged one among whose names were "Snake-Oil Sam," spoke to his underlings: "It'll take them fourteen days to get back with the settlers. We'll have time to overhaul the blasters. We haven't had any well-equipped settlers for six weeks. It used to be we'd hardly have time to strip and slaughter and stow before there was another batch to take care of." "I think you'd better write me some new lines," said Adam. "I feel like a goof saying those same ones to each bunch." "You are a goof, and therefore perfect for the part. I was in show business long enough to know never to change a line too soon. I did change Adam and Eve to Ha-Adamah and Hawwah, and the apple to the pomegranate. People aren't becoming any smarter—but they are becoming better researched, and they insist on authenticity. "This is still a perfect come-on here. There is something in human nature that cannot resist the idea of a Perfect Paradise. Folks will whoop and holler to their neighbors to come in droves to spoil and mar it. It isn't greed or the desire for new land so much—though that is strong too. Mainly it is the feverish passion to befoul and poison what is unspoiled. Fortunately I am sagacious enough to take advantage of this trait. And when you start to farm a new world on a shoestring you have to acquire your equipment as you can." He looked proudly around at the great cave with its mountains and tiers of materials, heavy machinery of all sorts, titanic crates of foodstuff space-sealed; wheeled, tracked, propped, vaned and jetted vehicles; and power packs to run a world. He looked at the three dozen space ships stripped and stacked, and at the rather large pile of bone-meal in one corner. "We will have to have another lion," said Eve. "Bowser is getting old, and Marie-Yvette abuses him and gnaws his toes. And we do have to have a big-maned lion to lie down with the lamb." "I know it, Eve. The lion is a very important prop. Maybe one of the crackpot settlers will bring a new lion." "And can't you mix another kind of shining paint? This itches. It's hell." "I'm working on it." Casper Craig was still dictating the gram: "Amazing quality of longevity seemingly inherent in the locale. Climate ideal. Daylight or half-light. All twenty-one hours from Planet Delphina and from Sol. Pure water for all industrial purposes. Scenic and storied. Zoning and pre-settlement restrictions to insure congenial neighbors. A completely planned globular settlement in a near arm of our own galaxy. Low taxes and liberal credit. Financing our specialty—" "And you had better have an armed escort when you return," said Father Briton. "Why in cosmos would we want an armed escort?" "It's as phony as a seven-credit note!" "You, a man of the cloth doubt it? And us ready skeptics convinced by our senses? Why do you doubt?" "It is only the unbelieving who believe so easily in obvious frauds. Theologically unsound, dramaturgically weak, philologically impossible, zoologically rigged, salted conspicuously with gold and shot through with anachronisms. And moreover he was afraid to play me at checkers." "What?" "If I have a preternatural intellect I wouldn't be afraid of a game of checkers with anyone. Yet there was an unusual mind there somewhere; it was just that he chose not to make our acquaintance personally." "They looked at the priest thoughtfully. "But it was Paradise in one way," said Steiner at last. "How?" "All the time we were there the woman did not speak."

Describe the story's characters and how they interact.

6

The crew of the spaceship visiting “Paradise” is made up of six men: Captain Stark, Steiner, Father Briton, Casper Craig, Wolfgang Langweilig, and Gregory Gilbert, the executive officer. Each man serves his own purpose on board their ship. Based on their friendliness and camaraderie, these men have worked together before. Finding paradise was not their first mission. Although Stark is the captain, he often asks favors from Father Briton, the advanced linguist. In commanding him and letting him work, Stark is showing his complete trust in his crew. However, the group of creatures on Paradise interact a little differently. As Father Briton mentions later in the story, it’s clear that there was a powerful Thought (mind or being) on the planet, it just didn’t reveal itself to them. The Serpent, or Snake-Oil Sam, hides out in a cave with the equipment, money, ships, and bone meal that they have stolen from previous settlers. He is the true brains behind the operation. He has Ha-Adamah and Hawwah under his command, and, though they complain about the itchy costume, they are on board with his plan. He is clearly in charge and more manipulative than Captain Stark. As the Serpent and his crew act out paradise, Captain Stark and his crew fall for it. All except for Father Briton. But the others don’t listen to him. They only laugh off his ideas and request for an armed escort.

61007

IT WAS A DULL, ROUTINE LITTLE WORLD. IT DIDN'T EVEN HAVE A CITY. EVERYTHING IT HAD WAS IN THE GARDEN BY R. A. LAFFERTY [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, March 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] The protozoic recorder chirped like a bird. Not only would there be life traces on that little moon, but it would be a lively place. So they skipped several steps in the procedure. The chordata discerner read Positive over most of the surface. There was spinal fluid on that orb, rivers of it. So again they omitted several tests and went to the cognition scanner. Would it show Thought on the body? Naturally they did not get results at once, nor did they expect to; it required a fine adjustment. But they were disappointed that they found nothing for several hours as they hovered high over the rotation. Then it came—clearly and definitely, but from quite a small location only. "Limited," said Steiner, "as though within a pale. As though there were but one city, if that is its form. Shall we follow the rest of the surface to find another, or concentrate on this? It'll be twelve hours before it's back in our ken if we let it go now." "Let's lock on this one and finish the scan. Then we can do the rest of the world to make sure we've missed nothing," said Stark. There was one more test to run, one very tricky and difficult of analysis, that with the Extraordinary Perception Locator. This was designed simply to locate a source of superior thought. But this might be so varied or so unfamiliar that often both the machine and the designer of it were puzzled as to how to read the results. The E. P. Locator had been designed by Glaser. But when the Locator had refused to read Positive when turned on the inventor himself, bad blood developed between machine and man. Glaser knew that he had extraordinary perception. He was a much honored man in his field. He told the machine so heatedly. The machine replied, with such warmth that its relays chattered, that Glaser did not have extraordinary perception; he had only ordinary perception to an extraordinary degree. There is a difference , the machine insisted. It was for this reason that Glaser used that model no more, but built others more amenable. And it was for this reason also that the owners of Little Probe had acquired the original machine so cheaply. And there was no denying that the Extraordinary Perception Locator (or Eppel) was a contrary machine. On Earth it had read Positive on a number of crack-pots, including Waxey Sax, a jazz tootler who could not even read music. But it had also read Positive on ninety per cent of the acknowledged superior minds of the Earth. In space it had been a sound guide to the unusual intelligences encountered. Yet on Suzuki-Mi it had read Positive on a two-inch-long worm, only one of them out of billions. For the countless identical worms no trace of anything at all was shown by the test. So it was with mixed expectations that Steiner locked onto the area and got a flick. He then narrowed to a smaller area (apparently one individual, though this could not be certain) and got very definite action. Eppel was busy. The machine had a touch of the ham in it, and assumed an air of importance when it ran these tests. Finally it signaled the result, the most exasperating result it ever produces: the single orange light. It was the equivalent of the shrug of the shoulders in a man. They called it the "You tell me light." So among the intelligences there was at least one that might be extraordinary, though possibly in a crackpot way. It is good to be forewarned. "Scan the remainder of the world, Steiner," said Stark, "and the rest of us will get some sleep. If you find no other spot then we will go down on that one the next time it is in position under us, in about twelve hours." "You don't want to visit any of the other areas first? Somewhere away from the thoughtful creature?" "No. The rest of the world may be dangerous. There must be a reason that thought is in one spot only. If we find no others then we will go down boldly and visit this." So they all, except Steiner, went off to their bunks then: Stark, the Captain; Gregory Gilbert, the executive officer; Wolfgang Langweilig, the engineer; Casper Craig, super-cargo, tycoon and 51% owner of the Little Probe, and F. R. Briton, S.J., a Jesuit priest who was linguist and checker champion of the craft. Dawn did not come to the moon-town. The Little Probe hovered stationary in the light and the moon-town came up under the dawn. Then the Probe went down to visit whatever was there. "There's no town," said Steiner. "Not a building. Yet we're on the track of the minds. There's nothing but a meadow and some boscage, a sort of fountain or pool, and four streams coming out of it." "Keep on towards the minds," said Stark. "They're our target." "Not a building, not two sticks or stones placed together. That looks like an Earth-type sheep there. And that looks like an Earth-lion, I'm almost afraid to say. And those two ... why, they could well be Earth-people. But with a difference. Where is that bright light coming from?" "I don't know, but they're right in the middle of it. Land here. We'll go to meet them at once. Timidity has never been an efficacious tool with us." Well, they were people. And one could only wish that all people were like them. There was a man and a woman, and they were clothed either in very bright garments or in no garments at all, but only in a very bright light. "Talk to them, Father Briton," said Stark. "You are the linguist." "Howdy," said the priest. He may or may not have been understood, but the two of them smiled at him, so he went on. "Father Briton from Philadelphia," he said, "on detached service. And you, my good man, what is your handle, your monicker, your tag?" "Ha-Adamah," said the man. "And your daughter, or niece?" It may be that the shining man frowned momentarily at this; but the woman smiled, proving that she was human. "The woman is named Hawwah," said the man. "The sheep is named sheep, the lion is named lion, the horse is named horse and the hoolock is named hoolock." "I understand. It is possible that this could go on and on. How is it that you use the English tongue?" "I have only one tongue; but it is given to us to be understood by all; by the eagle, by the squirrel, by the ass, by the English." "We happen to be bloody Yankees, but we use a borrowed tongue. You wouldn't have a drink on you for a tubful of thirsty travellers, would you?" "The fountain." "Ah—I see." But the crew all drank of the fountain to be sociable. It was water, but water that excelled, cool and with all its original bubbles like the first water ever made. "What do you make of them?" asked Stark. "Human," said Steiner. "It may even be that they are a little more than human. I don't understand that light that surrounds them. And they seem to be clothed, as it were, in dignity." "And very little else," said Father Briton, "though that light trick does serve a purpose. But I'm not sure they'd pass in Philadelphia." "Talk to them again," said Stark. "You're the linguist." "That isn't necessary here, Captain. Talk to them yourself." "Are there any other people here?" Stark asked the man. "The two of us. Man and woman." "But are there any others?" "How would there be any others? What other kind of people could there be than man and woman?" "But is there more than one man or woman?" "How could there be more than one of anything?" The captain was a little puzzled by this, but he went on doggedly: "Ha-Adamah, what do you think that we are? Are we not people?" "You are not anything till I name you. But I will name you and then you can be. You are named Captain. He is named Priest. He is named Engineer. He is named Flunky." "Thanks a lot," said Steiner. "But are we not people?" persisted Captain Stark. "No. We are the people. There are no people but two. How could there be other people?" "And the damnest thing about it," muttered Langweilig, "is, how are you going to prove him wrong? But it does give you a small feeling." "Can we have something to eat?" asked the Captain. "Pick from the trees," said Ha-Adamah, "and then it may be that you will want to sleep on the grass. Being not of human nature (which does not need sleep or rest), it may be that you require respite. But you are free to enjoy the garden and its fruits." "We will," said Captain Stark. They wandered about the place, but they were uneasy. There were the animals. The lion and lioness were enough to make one cautious, though they offered no harm. The two bears had a puzzling look, as though they wanted either to frolic with you or to mangle you. "If there are only two people here," said Casper Craig, "then it may be that the rest of the world is not dangerous at all. It looked fertile wherever we scanned it, though not so fertile as this central bit. And those rocks would bear examining." "Flecked with gold, and possibly with something else," said Stark. "A very promising site." "And everything grows here," added Steiner. "Those are Earth-fruits and I never saw finer. I've tasted the grapes and plums and pears. The figs and dates are superb, the quince is as flavorsome as a quince can be, the cherries are excellent. And I never did taste such oranges. But I haven't yet tried the—" and he stopped. "If you're thinking what I'm afraid to think," said Gilbert, "then it will be the test at least: whether we're having a pleasant dream or whether this is reality. Go ahead and eat one." "I won't be the first to eat one. You eat." "Ask him first. You ask him." "Ha-Adamah, is it allowed to eat the apples?" "Certainly. Eat. It is the finest fruit in the garden." "Well, the analogy breaks down there," said Stark. "I was almost beginning to believe in the thing. But if it isn't that, then what. Father Briton, you are the linguist, but in Hebrew does not Ha-Adamah and Hawwah mean—?" "Of course they do. You know that as well as I." "I was never a believer. But would it be possible for the exact same proposition to maintain here as on Earth?" "All things are possible." And it was then that Ha-Adamah, the shining man, gave a wild cry: "No, no. Do not approach it. It is not allowed to eat of that one!" It was the pomegranate tree, and he was warning Langweilig away from it. "Once more, Father," said Stark, "you should be the authority; but does not the idea that it was the apple that was forbidden go back only to a medieval painting?" "It does. The name of the fruit is not mentioned in Genesis. In Hebrew exegesis, however, the pomegranate is usually indicated." "I thought so. Question the man further, Father. This is too incredible." "It is a little odd. Adam, old man, how long have you been here?" "Forever less six days is the answer that has been given to me. I never did understand the answer, however." "And have you gotten no older in all that time?" "I do not understand what 'older' is. I am as I have been from the beginning." "And do you think that you will ever die?" "To die I do not understand. I am taught that it is a property of fallen nature to die, and that does not pertain to me or mine." "And are you completely happy here?" "Perfectly happy according to my preternatural state. But I am taught that it might be possible to lose that happiness, and then to seek it vainly through all the ages. I am taught that sickness and ageing and even death could come if this happiness were ever lost. I am taught that on at least one other unfortunate world it has actually been lost." "Do you consider yourself a knowledgeable man?" "Yes, since I am the only man, and knowledge is natural to man. But I am further blessed. I have a preternatural intellect." Then Stark cut in once more: "There must be some one question you could ask him, Father. Some way to settle it. I am becoming nearly convinced." "Yes, there is a question that will settle it. Adam, old man, how about a game of checkers?" "This is hardly the time for clowning," said Stark. "I'm not clowning, Captain. How about it, Adam? I'll give you choice of colors and first move." "No. It would be no contest. I have a preternatural intellect." "Well, I beat a barber who was champion of Germantown. And I beat the champion of Morgan County, Tennessee, which is the hottest checker center on Earth. I've played against, and beaten, machines. But I never played a preternatural mind. Let's just set up the board, Adam, and have a go at it." "No. It would be no contest. I would not like to humble you." They were there for three days. They were delighted with the place. It was a world with everything, and it seemed to have only two inhabitants. They went everywhere except into the big cave. "What is there, Adam?" asked Captain Stark. "The great serpent lives there. I would not disturb him. He has long been cranky because plans he had for us did not materialize. But we are taught that should ever evil come to us, which it cannot if we persevere, it will come by him." They learned no more of the real nature of the sphere in their time there. Yet all but one of them were convinced of the reality when they left. And they talked of it as they took off. "A crowd would laugh if told of it," said Stark, "but not many would laugh if they had actually seen the place, or them. I am not a gullible man, but I am convinced of this: that this is a pristine and pure world and that ours and all the others we have visited are fallen worlds. Here are the prototypes of our first parents before their fall. They are garbed in light and innocence, and they have the happiness that we have been seeking for centuries. It would be a crime if anyone disturbed that happiness." "I too am convinced," said Steiner. "It is Paradise itself, where the lion lies down with the lamb, and where the serpent has not prevailed. It would be the darkest of crimes if we or others should play the part of the serpent, and intrude and spoil." "I am probably the most skeptical man in the world," said Casper Craig the tycoon, "but I do believe my eyes. I have been there and seen it. It is indeed an unspoiled Paradise; and it would be a crime calling to the wide heavens for vengeance for anyone to smirch in any way that perfection. "So much for that. Now to business. Gilbert, take a gram: Ninety Million Square Miles of Pristine Paradise for Sale or Lease. Farming, Ranching, exceptional opportunities for Horticulture. Gold, Silver, Iron, Earth-Type Fauna. Terms. Special Rates for Large Settlement Parties. Write, Gram, or call in person at any of our planetary offices as listed below. Ask for Brochure—Eden Acres Unlimited." Down in the great cave that Old Serpent, a two-legged one among whose names were "Snake-Oil Sam," spoke to his underlings: "It'll take them fourteen days to get back with the settlers. We'll have time to overhaul the blasters. We haven't had any well-equipped settlers for six weeks. It used to be we'd hardly have time to strip and slaughter and stow before there was another batch to take care of." "I think you'd better write me some new lines," said Adam. "I feel like a goof saying those same ones to each bunch." "You are a goof, and therefore perfect for the part. I was in show business long enough to know never to change a line too soon. I did change Adam and Eve to Ha-Adamah and Hawwah, and the apple to the pomegranate. People aren't becoming any smarter—but they are becoming better researched, and they insist on authenticity. "This is still a perfect come-on here. There is something in human nature that cannot resist the idea of a Perfect Paradise. Folks will whoop and holler to their neighbors to come in droves to spoil and mar it. It isn't greed or the desire for new land so much—though that is strong too. Mainly it is the feverish passion to befoul and poison what is unspoiled. Fortunately I am sagacious enough to take advantage of this trait. And when you start to farm a new world on a shoestring you have to acquire your equipment as you can." He looked proudly around at the great cave with its mountains and tiers of materials, heavy machinery of all sorts, titanic crates of foodstuff space-sealed; wheeled, tracked, propped, vaned and jetted vehicles; and power packs to run a world. He looked at the three dozen space ships stripped and stacked, and at the rather large pile of bone-meal in one corner. "We will have to have another lion," said Eve. "Bowser is getting old, and Marie-Yvette abuses him and gnaws his toes. And we do have to have a big-maned lion to lie down with the lamb." "I know it, Eve. The lion is a very important prop. Maybe one of the crackpot settlers will bring a new lion." "And can't you mix another kind of shining paint? This itches. It's hell." "I'm working on it." Casper Craig was still dictating the gram: "Amazing quality of longevity seemingly inherent in the locale. Climate ideal. Daylight or half-light. All twenty-one hours from Planet Delphina and from Sol. Pure water for all industrial purposes. Scenic and storied. Zoning and pre-settlement restrictions to insure congenial neighbors. A completely planned globular settlement in a near arm of our own galaxy. Low taxes and liberal credit. Financing our specialty—" "And you had better have an armed escort when you return," said Father Briton. "Why in cosmos would we want an armed escort?" "It's as phony as a seven-credit note!" "You, a man of the cloth doubt it? And us ready skeptics convinced by our senses? Why do you doubt?" "It is only the unbelieving who believe so easily in obvious frauds. Theologically unsound, dramaturgically weak, philologically impossible, zoologically rigged, salted conspicuously with gold and shot through with anachronisms. And moreover he was afraid to play me at checkers." "What?" "If I have a preternatural intellect I wouldn't be afraid of a game of checkers with anyone. Yet there was an unusual mind there somewhere; it was just that he chose not to make our acquaintance personally." "They looked at the priest thoughtfully. "But it was Paradise in one way," said Steiner at last. "How?" "All the time we were there the woman did not speak."

Describe the setting of the story.

5

The story takes place on an unnamed extraterrestrial moon and a small probe that is visiting the moon to investigate its suitability for development. The moon is an earthlike environment that appears to be a perfect paradise in every respect. The land is fertile, the wild animals are domesticated, and there is an abundance of fruit to eat and minerals to potentially harvest. The description of the world that the crew receives depicts it as a true Eden—a perfect paradise. Also on the moon is a massive cave, from where the inhabitants of the moon store their stolen goods and prepare to ambush unsuspecting potential settlers.

61007

IT WAS A DULL, ROUTINE LITTLE WORLD. IT DIDN'T EVEN HAVE A CITY. EVERYTHING IT HAD WAS IN THE GARDEN BY R. A. LAFFERTY [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, March 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] The protozoic recorder chirped like a bird. Not only would there be life traces on that little moon, but it would be a lively place. So they skipped several steps in the procedure. The chordata discerner read Positive over most of the surface. There was spinal fluid on that orb, rivers of it. So again they omitted several tests and went to the cognition scanner. Would it show Thought on the body? Naturally they did not get results at once, nor did they expect to; it required a fine adjustment. But they were disappointed that they found nothing for several hours as they hovered high over the rotation. Then it came—clearly and definitely, but from quite a small location only. "Limited," said Steiner, "as though within a pale. As though there were but one city, if that is its form. Shall we follow the rest of the surface to find another, or concentrate on this? It'll be twelve hours before it's back in our ken if we let it go now." "Let's lock on this one and finish the scan. Then we can do the rest of the world to make sure we've missed nothing," said Stark. There was one more test to run, one very tricky and difficult of analysis, that with the Extraordinary Perception Locator. This was designed simply to locate a source of superior thought. But this might be so varied or so unfamiliar that often both the machine and the designer of it were puzzled as to how to read the results. The E. P. Locator had been designed by Glaser. But when the Locator had refused to read Positive when turned on the inventor himself, bad blood developed between machine and man. Glaser knew that he had extraordinary perception. He was a much honored man in his field. He told the machine so heatedly. The machine replied, with such warmth that its relays chattered, that Glaser did not have extraordinary perception; he had only ordinary perception to an extraordinary degree. There is a difference , the machine insisted. It was for this reason that Glaser used that model no more, but built others more amenable. And it was for this reason also that the owners of Little Probe had acquired the original machine so cheaply. And there was no denying that the Extraordinary Perception Locator (or Eppel) was a contrary machine. On Earth it had read Positive on a number of crack-pots, including Waxey Sax, a jazz tootler who could not even read music. But it had also read Positive on ninety per cent of the acknowledged superior minds of the Earth. In space it had been a sound guide to the unusual intelligences encountered. Yet on Suzuki-Mi it had read Positive on a two-inch-long worm, only one of them out of billions. For the countless identical worms no trace of anything at all was shown by the test. So it was with mixed expectations that Steiner locked onto the area and got a flick. He then narrowed to a smaller area (apparently one individual, though this could not be certain) and got very definite action. Eppel was busy. The machine had a touch of the ham in it, and assumed an air of importance when it ran these tests. Finally it signaled the result, the most exasperating result it ever produces: the single orange light. It was the equivalent of the shrug of the shoulders in a man. They called it the "You tell me light." So among the intelligences there was at least one that might be extraordinary, though possibly in a crackpot way. It is good to be forewarned. "Scan the remainder of the world, Steiner," said Stark, "and the rest of us will get some sleep. If you find no other spot then we will go down on that one the next time it is in position under us, in about twelve hours." "You don't want to visit any of the other areas first? Somewhere away from the thoughtful creature?" "No. The rest of the world may be dangerous. There must be a reason that thought is in one spot only. If we find no others then we will go down boldly and visit this." So they all, except Steiner, went off to their bunks then: Stark, the Captain; Gregory Gilbert, the executive officer; Wolfgang Langweilig, the engineer; Casper Craig, super-cargo, tycoon and 51% owner of the Little Probe, and F. R. Briton, S.J., a Jesuit priest who was linguist and checker champion of the craft. Dawn did not come to the moon-town. The Little Probe hovered stationary in the light and the moon-town came up under the dawn. Then the Probe went down to visit whatever was there. "There's no town," said Steiner. "Not a building. Yet we're on the track of the minds. There's nothing but a meadow and some boscage, a sort of fountain or pool, and four streams coming out of it." "Keep on towards the minds," said Stark. "They're our target." "Not a building, not two sticks or stones placed together. That looks like an Earth-type sheep there. And that looks like an Earth-lion, I'm almost afraid to say. And those two ... why, they could well be Earth-people. But with a difference. Where is that bright light coming from?" "I don't know, but they're right in the middle of it. Land here. We'll go to meet them at once. Timidity has never been an efficacious tool with us." Well, they were people. And one could only wish that all people were like them. There was a man and a woman, and they were clothed either in very bright garments or in no garments at all, but only in a very bright light. "Talk to them, Father Briton," said Stark. "You are the linguist." "Howdy," said the priest. He may or may not have been understood, but the two of them smiled at him, so he went on. "Father Briton from Philadelphia," he said, "on detached service. And you, my good man, what is your handle, your monicker, your tag?" "Ha-Adamah," said the man. "And your daughter, or niece?" It may be that the shining man frowned momentarily at this; but the woman smiled, proving that she was human. "The woman is named Hawwah," said the man. "The sheep is named sheep, the lion is named lion, the horse is named horse and the hoolock is named hoolock." "I understand. It is possible that this could go on and on. How is it that you use the English tongue?" "I have only one tongue; but it is given to us to be understood by all; by the eagle, by the squirrel, by the ass, by the English." "We happen to be bloody Yankees, but we use a borrowed tongue. You wouldn't have a drink on you for a tubful of thirsty travellers, would you?" "The fountain." "Ah—I see." But the crew all drank of the fountain to be sociable. It was water, but water that excelled, cool and with all its original bubbles like the first water ever made. "What do you make of them?" asked Stark. "Human," said Steiner. "It may even be that they are a little more than human. I don't understand that light that surrounds them. And they seem to be clothed, as it were, in dignity." "And very little else," said Father Briton, "though that light trick does serve a purpose. But I'm not sure they'd pass in Philadelphia." "Talk to them again," said Stark. "You're the linguist." "That isn't necessary here, Captain. Talk to them yourself." "Are there any other people here?" Stark asked the man. "The two of us. Man and woman." "But are there any others?" "How would there be any others? What other kind of people could there be than man and woman?" "But is there more than one man or woman?" "How could there be more than one of anything?" The captain was a little puzzled by this, but he went on doggedly: "Ha-Adamah, what do you think that we are? Are we not people?" "You are not anything till I name you. But I will name you and then you can be. You are named Captain. He is named Priest. He is named Engineer. He is named Flunky." "Thanks a lot," said Steiner. "But are we not people?" persisted Captain Stark. "No. We are the people. There are no people but two. How could there be other people?" "And the damnest thing about it," muttered Langweilig, "is, how are you going to prove him wrong? But it does give you a small feeling." "Can we have something to eat?" asked the Captain. "Pick from the trees," said Ha-Adamah, "and then it may be that you will want to sleep on the grass. Being not of human nature (which does not need sleep or rest), it may be that you require respite. But you are free to enjoy the garden and its fruits." "We will," said Captain Stark. They wandered about the place, but they were uneasy. There were the animals. The lion and lioness were enough to make one cautious, though they offered no harm. The two bears had a puzzling look, as though they wanted either to frolic with you or to mangle you. "If there are only two people here," said Casper Craig, "then it may be that the rest of the world is not dangerous at all. It looked fertile wherever we scanned it, though not so fertile as this central bit. And those rocks would bear examining." "Flecked with gold, and possibly with something else," said Stark. "A very promising site." "And everything grows here," added Steiner. "Those are Earth-fruits and I never saw finer. I've tasted the grapes and plums and pears. The figs and dates are superb, the quince is as flavorsome as a quince can be, the cherries are excellent. And I never did taste such oranges. But I haven't yet tried the—" and he stopped. "If you're thinking what I'm afraid to think," said Gilbert, "then it will be the test at least: whether we're having a pleasant dream or whether this is reality. Go ahead and eat one." "I won't be the first to eat one. You eat." "Ask him first. You ask him." "Ha-Adamah, is it allowed to eat the apples?" "Certainly. Eat. It is the finest fruit in the garden." "Well, the analogy breaks down there," said Stark. "I was almost beginning to believe in the thing. But if it isn't that, then what. Father Briton, you are the linguist, but in Hebrew does not Ha-Adamah and Hawwah mean—?" "Of course they do. You know that as well as I." "I was never a believer. But would it be possible for the exact same proposition to maintain here as on Earth?" "All things are possible." And it was then that Ha-Adamah, the shining man, gave a wild cry: "No, no. Do not approach it. It is not allowed to eat of that one!" It was the pomegranate tree, and he was warning Langweilig away from it. "Once more, Father," said Stark, "you should be the authority; but does not the idea that it was the apple that was forbidden go back only to a medieval painting?" "It does. The name of the fruit is not mentioned in Genesis. In Hebrew exegesis, however, the pomegranate is usually indicated." "I thought so. Question the man further, Father. This is too incredible." "It is a little odd. Adam, old man, how long have you been here?" "Forever less six days is the answer that has been given to me. I never did understand the answer, however." "And have you gotten no older in all that time?" "I do not understand what 'older' is. I am as I have been from the beginning." "And do you think that you will ever die?" "To die I do not understand. I am taught that it is a property of fallen nature to die, and that does not pertain to me or mine." "And are you completely happy here?" "Perfectly happy according to my preternatural state. But I am taught that it might be possible to lose that happiness, and then to seek it vainly through all the ages. I am taught that sickness and ageing and even death could come if this happiness were ever lost. I am taught that on at least one other unfortunate world it has actually been lost." "Do you consider yourself a knowledgeable man?" "Yes, since I am the only man, and knowledge is natural to man. But I am further blessed. I have a preternatural intellect." Then Stark cut in once more: "There must be some one question you could ask him, Father. Some way to settle it. I am becoming nearly convinced." "Yes, there is a question that will settle it. Adam, old man, how about a game of checkers?" "This is hardly the time for clowning," said Stark. "I'm not clowning, Captain. How about it, Adam? I'll give you choice of colors and first move." "No. It would be no contest. I have a preternatural intellect." "Well, I beat a barber who was champion of Germantown. And I beat the champion of Morgan County, Tennessee, which is the hottest checker center on Earth. I've played against, and beaten, machines. But I never played a preternatural mind. Let's just set up the board, Adam, and have a go at it." "No. It would be no contest. I would not like to humble you." They were there for three days. They were delighted with the place. It was a world with everything, and it seemed to have only two inhabitants. They went everywhere except into the big cave. "What is there, Adam?" asked Captain Stark. "The great serpent lives there. I would not disturb him. He has long been cranky because plans he had for us did not materialize. But we are taught that should ever evil come to us, which it cannot if we persevere, it will come by him." They learned no more of the real nature of the sphere in their time there. Yet all but one of them were convinced of the reality when they left. And they talked of it as they took off. "A crowd would laugh if told of it," said Stark, "but not many would laugh if they had actually seen the place, or them. I am not a gullible man, but I am convinced of this: that this is a pristine and pure world and that ours and all the others we have visited are fallen worlds. Here are the prototypes of our first parents before their fall. They are garbed in light and innocence, and they have the happiness that we have been seeking for centuries. It would be a crime if anyone disturbed that happiness." "I too am convinced," said Steiner. "It is Paradise itself, where the lion lies down with the lamb, and where the serpent has not prevailed. It would be the darkest of crimes if we or others should play the part of the serpent, and intrude and spoil." "I am probably the most skeptical man in the world," said Casper Craig the tycoon, "but I do believe my eyes. I have been there and seen it. It is indeed an unspoiled Paradise; and it would be a crime calling to the wide heavens for vengeance for anyone to smirch in any way that perfection. "So much for that. Now to business. Gilbert, take a gram: Ninety Million Square Miles of Pristine Paradise for Sale or Lease. Farming, Ranching, exceptional opportunities for Horticulture. Gold, Silver, Iron, Earth-Type Fauna. Terms. Special Rates for Large Settlement Parties. Write, Gram, or call in person at any of our planetary offices as listed below. Ask for Brochure—Eden Acres Unlimited." Down in the great cave that Old Serpent, a two-legged one among whose names were "Snake-Oil Sam," spoke to his underlings: "It'll take them fourteen days to get back with the settlers. We'll have time to overhaul the blasters. We haven't had any well-equipped settlers for six weeks. It used to be we'd hardly have time to strip and slaughter and stow before there was another batch to take care of." "I think you'd better write me some new lines," said Adam. "I feel like a goof saying those same ones to each bunch." "You are a goof, and therefore perfect for the part. I was in show business long enough to know never to change a line too soon. I did change Adam and Eve to Ha-Adamah and Hawwah, and the apple to the pomegranate. People aren't becoming any smarter—but they are becoming better researched, and they insist on authenticity. "This is still a perfect come-on here. There is something in human nature that cannot resist the idea of a Perfect Paradise. Folks will whoop and holler to their neighbors to come in droves to spoil and mar it. It isn't greed or the desire for new land so much—though that is strong too. Mainly it is the feverish passion to befoul and poison what is unspoiled. Fortunately I am sagacious enough to take advantage of this trait. And when you start to farm a new world on a shoestring you have to acquire your equipment as you can." He looked proudly around at the great cave with its mountains and tiers of materials, heavy machinery of all sorts, titanic crates of foodstuff space-sealed; wheeled, tracked, propped, vaned and jetted vehicles; and power packs to run a world. He looked at the three dozen space ships stripped and stacked, and at the rather large pile of bone-meal in one corner. "We will have to have another lion," said Eve. "Bowser is getting old, and Marie-Yvette abuses him and gnaws his toes. And we do have to have a big-maned lion to lie down with the lamb." "I know it, Eve. The lion is a very important prop. Maybe one of the crackpot settlers will bring a new lion." "And can't you mix another kind of shining paint? This itches. It's hell." "I'm working on it." Casper Craig was still dictating the gram: "Amazing quality of longevity seemingly inherent in the locale. Climate ideal. Daylight or half-light. All twenty-one hours from Planet Delphina and from Sol. Pure water for all industrial purposes. Scenic and storied. Zoning and pre-settlement restrictions to insure congenial neighbors. A completely planned globular settlement in a near arm of our own galaxy. Low taxes and liberal credit. Financing our specialty—" "And you had better have an armed escort when you return," said Father Briton. "Why in cosmos would we want an armed escort?" "It's as phony as a seven-credit note!" "You, a man of the cloth doubt it? And us ready skeptics convinced by our senses? Why do you doubt?" "It is only the unbelieving who believe so easily in obvious frauds. Theologically unsound, dramaturgically weak, philologically impossible, zoologically rigged, salted conspicuously with gold and shot through with anachronisms. And moreover he was afraid to play me at checkers." "What?" "If I have a preternatural intellect I wouldn't be afraid of a game of checkers with anyone. Yet there was an unusual mind there somewhere; it was just that he chose not to make our acquaintance personally." "They looked at the priest thoughtfully. "But it was Paradise in one way," said Steiner at last. "How?" "All the time we were there the woman did not speak."

Describe the setting of the story.

1

The crew members come across a new moon they have never visited before. Once they land, they find a mostly naked man and woman who are glowing in light. There are no cities or buildings, no civilization at all. Instead, they discover a lamb that lays with a lion and bears that do not fight the other animals. The magnificent water and fruit that the land bears, along with many other clues, convince them that they have stumbled upon the Garden of Eden. When the visitors learn about the nearby serpent who lives in a cave and has the power to bring about evil to the land, they are downright convinced that this place is just like Earth, except it is still pure. After staying several days, the men take off in their spaceship and Adam and Eve are revealed to be con artists. Snake-Oil Sam, their boss, is hiding in a cave, and he has stockpiled dozens of spaceships, piles of bonemeal, and lots of equipment to use to create his own civilization. Sam knows that the land is perfect for farming and it is beautiful and untouched. He wants to destroy it in his own way, by creating his own society.

61007

IT WAS A DULL, ROUTINE LITTLE WORLD. IT DIDN'T EVEN HAVE A CITY. EVERYTHING IT HAD WAS IN THE GARDEN BY R. A. LAFFERTY [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, March 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] The protozoic recorder chirped like a bird. Not only would there be life traces on that little moon, but it would be a lively place. So they skipped several steps in the procedure. The chordata discerner read Positive over most of the surface. There was spinal fluid on that orb, rivers of it. So again they omitted several tests and went to the cognition scanner. Would it show Thought on the body? Naturally they did not get results at once, nor did they expect to; it required a fine adjustment. But they were disappointed that they found nothing for several hours as they hovered high over the rotation. Then it came—clearly and definitely, but from quite a small location only. "Limited," said Steiner, "as though within a pale. As though there were but one city, if that is its form. Shall we follow the rest of the surface to find another, or concentrate on this? It'll be twelve hours before it's back in our ken if we let it go now." "Let's lock on this one and finish the scan. Then we can do the rest of the world to make sure we've missed nothing," said Stark. There was one more test to run, one very tricky and difficult of analysis, that with the Extraordinary Perception Locator. This was designed simply to locate a source of superior thought. But this might be so varied or so unfamiliar that often both the machine and the designer of it were puzzled as to how to read the results. The E. P. Locator had been designed by Glaser. But when the Locator had refused to read Positive when turned on the inventor himself, bad blood developed between machine and man. Glaser knew that he had extraordinary perception. He was a much honored man in his field. He told the machine so heatedly. The machine replied, with such warmth that its relays chattered, that Glaser did not have extraordinary perception; he had only ordinary perception to an extraordinary degree. There is a difference , the machine insisted. It was for this reason that Glaser used that model no more, but built others more amenable. And it was for this reason also that the owners of Little Probe had acquired the original machine so cheaply. And there was no denying that the Extraordinary Perception Locator (or Eppel) was a contrary machine. On Earth it had read Positive on a number of crack-pots, including Waxey Sax, a jazz tootler who could not even read music. But it had also read Positive on ninety per cent of the acknowledged superior minds of the Earth. In space it had been a sound guide to the unusual intelligences encountered. Yet on Suzuki-Mi it had read Positive on a two-inch-long worm, only one of them out of billions. For the countless identical worms no trace of anything at all was shown by the test. So it was with mixed expectations that Steiner locked onto the area and got a flick. He then narrowed to a smaller area (apparently one individual, though this could not be certain) and got very definite action. Eppel was busy. The machine had a touch of the ham in it, and assumed an air of importance when it ran these tests. Finally it signaled the result, the most exasperating result it ever produces: the single orange light. It was the equivalent of the shrug of the shoulders in a man. They called it the "You tell me light." So among the intelligences there was at least one that might be extraordinary, though possibly in a crackpot way. It is good to be forewarned. "Scan the remainder of the world, Steiner," said Stark, "and the rest of us will get some sleep. If you find no other spot then we will go down on that one the next time it is in position under us, in about twelve hours." "You don't want to visit any of the other areas first? Somewhere away from the thoughtful creature?" "No. The rest of the world may be dangerous. There must be a reason that thought is in one spot only. If we find no others then we will go down boldly and visit this." So they all, except Steiner, went off to their bunks then: Stark, the Captain; Gregory Gilbert, the executive officer; Wolfgang Langweilig, the engineer; Casper Craig, super-cargo, tycoon and 51% owner of the Little Probe, and F. R. Briton, S.J., a Jesuit priest who was linguist and checker champion of the craft. Dawn did not come to the moon-town. The Little Probe hovered stationary in the light and the moon-town came up under the dawn. Then the Probe went down to visit whatever was there. "There's no town," said Steiner. "Not a building. Yet we're on the track of the minds. There's nothing but a meadow and some boscage, a sort of fountain or pool, and four streams coming out of it." "Keep on towards the minds," said Stark. "They're our target." "Not a building, not two sticks or stones placed together. That looks like an Earth-type sheep there. And that looks like an Earth-lion, I'm almost afraid to say. And those two ... why, they could well be Earth-people. But with a difference. Where is that bright light coming from?" "I don't know, but they're right in the middle of it. Land here. We'll go to meet them at once. Timidity has never been an efficacious tool with us." Well, they were people. And one could only wish that all people were like them. There was a man and a woman, and they were clothed either in very bright garments or in no garments at all, but only in a very bright light. "Talk to them, Father Briton," said Stark. "You are the linguist." "Howdy," said the priest. He may or may not have been understood, but the two of them smiled at him, so he went on. "Father Briton from Philadelphia," he said, "on detached service. And you, my good man, what is your handle, your monicker, your tag?" "Ha-Adamah," said the man. "And your daughter, or niece?" It may be that the shining man frowned momentarily at this; but the woman smiled, proving that she was human. "The woman is named Hawwah," said the man. "The sheep is named sheep, the lion is named lion, the horse is named horse and the hoolock is named hoolock." "I understand. It is possible that this could go on and on. How is it that you use the English tongue?" "I have only one tongue; but it is given to us to be understood by all; by the eagle, by the squirrel, by the ass, by the English." "We happen to be bloody Yankees, but we use a borrowed tongue. You wouldn't have a drink on you for a tubful of thirsty travellers, would you?" "The fountain." "Ah—I see." But the crew all drank of the fountain to be sociable. It was water, but water that excelled, cool and with all its original bubbles like the first water ever made. "What do you make of them?" asked Stark. "Human," said Steiner. "It may even be that they are a little more than human. I don't understand that light that surrounds them. And they seem to be clothed, as it were, in dignity." "And very little else," said Father Briton, "though that light trick does serve a purpose. But I'm not sure they'd pass in Philadelphia." "Talk to them again," said Stark. "You're the linguist." "That isn't necessary here, Captain. Talk to them yourself." "Are there any other people here?" Stark asked the man. "The two of us. Man and woman." "But are there any others?" "How would there be any others? What other kind of people could there be than man and woman?" "But is there more than one man or woman?" "How could there be more than one of anything?" The captain was a little puzzled by this, but he went on doggedly: "Ha-Adamah, what do you think that we are? Are we not people?" "You are not anything till I name you. But I will name you and then you can be. You are named Captain. He is named Priest. He is named Engineer. He is named Flunky." "Thanks a lot," said Steiner. "But are we not people?" persisted Captain Stark. "No. We are the people. There are no people but two. How could there be other people?" "And the damnest thing about it," muttered Langweilig, "is, how are you going to prove him wrong? But it does give you a small feeling." "Can we have something to eat?" asked the Captain. "Pick from the trees," said Ha-Adamah, "and then it may be that you will want to sleep on the grass. Being not of human nature (which does not need sleep or rest), it may be that you require respite. But you are free to enjoy the garden and its fruits." "We will," said Captain Stark. They wandered about the place, but they were uneasy. There were the animals. The lion and lioness were enough to make one cautious, though they offered no harm. The two bears had a puzzling look, as though they wanted either to frolic with you or to mangle you. "If there are only two people here," said Casper Craig, "then it may be that the rest of the world is not dangerous at all. It looked fertile wherever we scanned it, though not so fertile as this central bit. And those rocks would bear examining." "Flecked with gold, and possibly with something else," said Stark. "A very promising site." "And everything grows here," added Steiner. "Those are Earth-fruits and I never saw finer. I've tasted the grapes and plums and pears. The figs and dates are superb, the quince is as flavorsome as a quince can be, the cherries are excellent. And I never did taste such oranges. But I haven't yet tried the—" and he stopped. "If you're thinking what I'm afraid to think," said Gilbert, "then it will be the test at least: whether we're having a pleasant dream or whether this is reality. Go ahead and eat one." "I won't be the first to eat one. You eat." "Ask him first. You ask him." "Ha-Adamah, is it allowed to eat the apples?" "Certainly. Eat. It is the finest fruit in the garden." "Well, the analogy breaks down there," said Stark. "I was almost beginning to believe in the thing. But if it isn't that, then what. Father Briton, you are the linguist, but in Hebrew does not Ha-Adamah and Hawwah mean—?" "Of course they do. You know that as well as I." "I was never a believer. But would it be possible for the exact same proposition to maintain here as on Earth?" "All things are possible." And it was then that Ha-Adamah, the shining man, gave a wild cry: "No, no. Do not approach it. It is not allowed to eat of that one!" It was the pomegranate tree, and he was warning Langweilig away from it. "Once more, Father," said Stark, "you should be the authority; but does not the idea that it was the apple that was forbidden go back only to a medieval painting?" "It does. The name of the fruit is not mentioned in Genesis. In Hebrew exegesis, however, the pomegranate is usually indicated." "I thought so. Question the man further, Father. This is too incredible." "It is a little odd. Adam, old man, how long have you been here?" "Forever less six days is the answer that has been given to me. I never did understand the answer, however." "And have you gotten no older in all that time?" "I do not understand what 'older' is. I am as I have been from the beginning." "And do you think that you will ever die?" "To die I do not understand. I am taught that it is a property of fallen nature to die, and that does not pertain to me or mine." "And are you completely happy here?" "Perfectly happy according to my preternatural state. But I am taught that it might be possible to lose that happiness, and then to seek it vainly through all the ages. I am taught that sickness and ageing and even death could come if this happiness were ever lost. I am taught that on at least one other unfortunate world it has actually been lost." "Do you consider yourself a knowledgeable man?" "Yes, since I am the only man, and knowledge is natural to man. But I am further blessed. I have a preternatural intellect." Then Stark cut in once more: "There must be some one question you could ask him, Father. Some way to settle it. I am becoming nearly convinced." "Yes, there is a question that will settle it. Adam, old man, how about a game of checkers?" "This is hardly the time for clowning," said Stark. "I'm not clowning, Captain. How about it, Adam? I'll give you choice of colors and first move." "No. It would be no contest. I have a preternatural intellect." "Well, I beat a barber who was champion of Germantown. And I beat the champion of Morgan County, Tennessee, which is the hottest checker center on Earth. I've played against, and beaten, machines. But I never played a preternatural mind. Let's just set up the board, Adam, and have a go at it." "No. It would be no contest. I would not like to humble you." They were there for three days. They were delighted with the place. It was a world with everything, and it seemed to have only two inhabitants. They went everywhere except into the big cave. "What is there, Adam?" asked Captain Stark. "The great serpent lives there. I would not disturb him. He has long been cranky because plans he had for us did not materialize. But we are taught that should ever evil come to us, which it cannot if we persevere, it will come by him." They learned no more of the real nature of the sphere in their time there. Yet all but one of them were convinced of the reality when they left. And they talked of it as they took off. "A crowd would laugh if told of it," said Stark, "but not many would laugh if they had actually seen the place, or them. I am not a gullible man, but I am convinced of this: that this is a pristine and pure world and that ours and all the others we have visited are fallen worlds. Here are the prototypes of our first parents before their fall. They are garbed in light and innocence, and they have the happiness that we have been seeking for centuries. It would be a crime if anyone disturbed that happiness." "I too am convinced," said Steiner. "It is Paradise itself, where the lion lies down with the lamb, and where the serpent has not prevailed. It would be the darkest of crimes if we or others should play the part of the serpent, and intrude and spoil." "I am probably the most skeptical man in the world," said Casper Craig the tycoon, "but I do believe my eyes. I have been there and seen it. It is indeed an unspoiled Paradise; and it would be a crime calling to the wide heavens for vengeance for anyone to smirch in any way that perfection. "So much for that. Now to business. Gilbert, take a gram: Ninety Million Square Miles of Pristine Paradise for Sale or Lease. Farming, Ranching, exceptional opportunities for Horticulture. Gold, Silver, Iron, Earth-Type Fauna. Terms. Special Rates for Large Settlement Parties. Write, Gram, or call in person at any of our planetary offices as listed below. Ask for Brochure—Eden Acres Unlimited." Down in the great cave that Old Serpent, a two-legged one among whose names were "Snake-Oil Sam," spoke to his underlings: "It'll take them fourteen days to get back with the settlers. We'll have time to overhaul the blasters. We haven't had any well-equipped settlers for six weeks. It used to be we'd hardly have time to strip and slaughter and stow before there was another batch to take care of." "I think you'd better write me some new lines," said Adam. "I feel like a goof saying those same ones to each bunch." "You are a goof, and therefore perfect for the part. I was in show business long enough to know never to change a line too soon. I did change Adam and Eve to Ha-Adamah and Hawwah, and the apple to the pomegranate. People aren't becoming any smarter—but they are becoming better researched, and they insist on authenticity. "This is still a perfect come-on here. There is something in human nature that cannot resist the idea of a Perfect Paradise. Folks will whoop and holler to their neighbors to come in droves to spoil and mar it. It isn't greed or the desire for new land so much—though that is strong too. Mainly it is the feverish passion to befoul and poison what is unspoiled. Fortunately I am sagacious enough to take advantage of this trait. And when you start to farm a new world on a shoestring you have to acquire your equipment as you can." He looked proudly around at the great cave with its mountains and tiers of materials, heavy machinery of all sorts, titanic crates of foodstuff space-sealed; wheeled, tracked, propped, vaned and jetted vehicles; and power packs to run a world. He looked at the three dozen space ships stripped and stacked, and at the rather large pile of bone-meal in one corner. "We will have to have another lion," said Eve. "Bowser is getting old, and Marie-Yvette abuses him and gnaws his toes. And we do have to have a big-maned lion to lie down with the lamb." "I know it, Eve. The lion is a very important prop. Maybe one of the crackpot settlers will bring a new lion." "And can't you mix another kind of shining paint? This itches. It's hell." "I'm working on it." Casper Craig was still dictating the gram: "Amazing quality of longevity seemingly inherent in the locale. Climate ideal. Daylight or half-light. All twenty-one hours from Planet Delphina and from Sol. Pure water for all industrial purposes. Scenic and storied. Zoning and pre-settlement restrictions to insure congenial neighbors. A completely planned globular settlement in a near arm of our own galaxy. Low taxes and liberal credit. Financing our specialty—" "And you had better have an armed escort when you return," said Father Briton. "Why in cosmos would we want an armed escort?" "It's as phony as a seven-credit note!" "You, a man of the cloth doubt it? And us ready skeptics convinced by our senses? Why do you doubt?" "It is only the unbelieving who believe so easily in obvious frauds. Theologically unsound, dramaturgically weak, philologically impossible, zoologically rigged, salted conspicuously with gold and shot through with anachronisms. And moreover he was afraid to play me at checkers." "What?" "If I have a preternatural intellect I wouldn't be afraid of a game of checkers with anyone. Yet there was an unusual mind there somewhere; it was just that he chose not to make our acquaintance personally." "They looked at the priest thoughtfully. "But it was Paradise in one way," said Steiner at last. "How?" "All the time we were there the woman did not speak."

Describe the setting of the story.

3

The majority of this story takes place on the surface of a small moon, in an area with a gorgeous garden and large variety of flora and fauna that are familiar from Earth. The crew of the Little Probe visits for three days, looking to investigate the signs of life and intelligence that their scans had reported. There are two people covered in very bright light, and meadows, forests, and a fountain, but no buildings. The water in the fountain is cool and clean, and the trees have any number of fresh fruits to pick from. The animals there, including lions, sheep, and monkeys, seem to enjoy the soft grass. The one area the crew of the Little Probe did not visit was a large cave that they were told was the home of the great serpent. When Ha-Adamah goes to talk to the serpent we see that this cave is filled with various types of supplies, military and practical, including power equipment, food, and dozens of space ships.

61007

IT WAS A DULL, ROUTINE LITTLE WORLD. IT DIDN'T EVEN HAVE A CITY. EVERYTHING IT HAD WAS IN THE GARDEN BY R. A. LAFFERTY [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, March 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] The protozoic recorder chirped like a bird. Not only would there be life traces on that little moon, but it would be a lively place. So they skipped several steps in the procedure. The chordata discerner read Positive over most of the surface. There was spinal fluid on that orb, rivers of it. So again they omitted several tests and went to the cognition scanner. Would it show Thought on the body? Naturally they did not get results at once, nor did they expect to; it required a fine adjustment. But they were disappointed that they found nothing for several hours as they hovered high over the rotation. Then it came—clearly and definitely, but from quite a small location only. "Limited," said Steiner, "as though within a pale. As though there were but one city, if that is its form. Shall we follow the rest of the surface to find another, or concentrate on this? It'll be twelve hours before it's back in our ken if we let it go now." "Let's lock on this one and finish the scan. Then we can do the rest of the world to make sure we've missed nothing," said Stark. There was one more test to run, one very tricky and difficult of analysis, that with the Extraordinary Perception Locator. This was designed simply to locate a source of superior thought. But this might be so varied or so unfamiliar that often both the machine and the designer of it were puzzled as to how to read the results. The E. P. Locator had been designed by Glaser. But when the Locator had refused to read Positive when turned on the inventor himself, bad blood developed between machine and man. Glaser knew that he had extraordinary perception. He was a much honored man in his field. He told the machine so heatedly. The machine replied, with such warmth that its relays chattered, that Glaser did not have extraordinary perception; he had only ordinary perception to an extraordinary degree. There is a difference , the machine insisted. It was for this reason that Glaser used that model no more, but built others more amenable. And it was for this reason also that the owners of Little Probe had acquired the original machine so cheaply. And there was no denying that the Extraordinary Perception Locator (or Eppel) was a contrary machine. On Earth it had read Positive on a number of crack-pots, including Waxey Sax, a jazz tootler who could not even read music. But it had also read Positive on ninety per cent of the acknowledged superior minds of the Earth. In space it had been a sound guide to the unusual intelligences encountered. Yet on Suzuki-Mi it had read Positive on a two-inch-long worm, only one of them out of billions. For the countless identical worms no trace of anything at all was shown by the test. So it was with mixed expectations that Steiner locked onto the area and got a flick. He then narrowed to a smaller area (apparently one individual, though this could not be certain) and got very definite action. Eppel was busy. The machine had a touch of the ham in it, and assumed an air of importance when it ran these tests. Finally it signaled the result, the most exasperating result it ever produces: the single orange light. It was the equivalent of the shrug of the shoulders in a man. They called it the "You tell me light." So among the intelligences there was at least one that might be extraordinary, though possibly in a crackpot way. It is good to be forewarned. "Scan the remainder of the world, Steiner," said Stark, "and the rest of us will get some sleep. If you find no other spot then we will go down on that one the next time it is in position under us, in about twelve hours." "You don't want to visit any of the other areas first? Somewhere away from the thoughtful creature?" "No. The rest of the world may be dangerous. There must be a reason that thought is in one spot only. If we find no others then we will go down boldly and visit this." So they all, except Steiner, went off to their bunks then: Stark, the Captain; Gregory Gilbert, the executive officer; Wolfgang Langweilig, the engineer; Casper Craig, super-cargo, tycoon and 51% owner of the Little Probe, and F. R. Briton, S.J., a Jesuit priest who was linguist and checker champion of the craft. Dawn did not come to the moon-town. The Little Probe hovered stationary in the light and the moon-town came up under the dawn. Then the Probe went down to visit whatever was there. "There's no town," said Steiner. "Not a building. Yet we're on the track of the minds. There's nothing but a meadow and some boscage, a sort of fountain or pool, and four streams coming out of it." "Keep on towards the minds," said Stark. "They're our target." "Not a building, not two sticks or stones placed together. That looks like an Earth-type sheep there. And that looks like an Earth-lion, I'm almost afraid to say. And those two ... why, they could well be Earth-people. But with a difference. Where is that bright light coming from?" "I don't know, but they're right in the middle of it. Land here. We'll go to meet them at once. Timidity has never been an efficacious tool with us." Well, they were people. And one could only wish that all people were like them. There was a man and a woman, and they were clothed either in very bright garments or in no garments at all, but only in a very bright light. "Talk to them, Father Briton," said Stark. "You are the linguist." "Howdy," said the priest. He may or may not have been understood, but the two of them smiled at him, so he went on. "Father Briton from Philadelphia," he said, "on detached service. And you, my good man, what is your handle, your monicker, your tag?" "Ha-Adamah," said the man. "And your daughter, or niece?" It may be that the shining man frowned momentarily at this; but the woman smiled, proving that she was human. "The woman is named Hawwah," said the man. "The sheep is named sheep, the lion is named lion, the horse is named horse and the hoolock is named hoolock." "I understand. It is possible that this could go on and on. How is it that you use the English tongue?" "I have only one tongue; but it is given to us to be understood by all; by the eagle, by the squirrel, by the ass, by the English." "We happen to be bloody Yankees, but we use a borrowed tongue. You wouldn't have a drink on you for a tubful of thirsty travellers, would you?" "The fountain." "Ah—I see." But the crew all drank of the fountain to be sociable. It was water, but water that excelled, cool and with all its original bubbles like the first water ever made. "What do you make of them?" asked Stark. "Human," said Steiner. "It may even be that they are a little more than human. I don't understand that light that surrounds them. And they seem to be clothed, as it were, in dignity." "And very little else," said Father Briton, "though that light trick does serve a purpose. But I'm not sure they'd pass in Philadelphia." "Talk to them again," said Stark. "You're the linguist." "That isn't necessary here, Captain. Talk to them yourself." "Are there any other people here?" Stark asked the man. "The two of us. Man and woman." "But are there any others?" "How would there be any others? What other kind of people could there be than man and woman?" "But is there more than one man or woman?" "How could there be more than one of anything?" The captain was a little puzzled by this, but he went on doggedly: "Ha-Adamah, what do you think that we are? Are we not people?" "You are not anything till I name you. But I will name you and then you can be. You are named Captain. He is named Priest. He is named Engineer. He is named Flunky." "Thanks a lot," said Steiner. "But are we not people?" persisted Captain Stark. "No. We are the people. There are no people but two. How could there be other people?" "And the damnest thing about it," muttered Langweilig, "is, how are you going to prove him wrong? But it does give you a small feeling." "Can we have something to eat?" asked the Captain. "Pick from the trees," said Ha-Adamah, "and then it may be that you will want to sleep on the grass. Being not of human nature (which does not need sleep or rest), it may be that you require respite. But you are free to enjoy the garden and its fruits." "We will," said Captain Stark. They wandered about the place, but they were uneasy. There were the animals. The lion and lioness were enough to make one cautious, though they offered no harm. The two bears had a puzzling look, as though they wanted either to frolic with you or to mangle you. "If there are only two people here," said Casper Craig, "then it may be that the rest of the world is not dangerous at all. It looked fertile wherever we scanned it, though not so fertile as this central bit. And those rocks would bear examining." "Flecked with gold, and possibly with something else," said Stark. "A very promising site." "And everything grows here," added Steiner. "Those are Earth-fruits and I never saw finer. I've tasted the grapes and plums and pears. The figs and dates are superb, the quince is as flavorsome as a quince can be, the cherries are excellent. And I never did taste such oranges. But I haven't yet tried the—" and he stopped. "If you're thinking what I'm afraid to think," said Gilbert, "then it will be the test at least: whether we're having a pleasant dream or whether this is reality. Go ahead and eat one." "I won't be the first to eat one. You eat." "Ask him first. You ask him." "Ha-Adamah, is it allowed to eat the apples?" "Certainly. Eat. It is the finest fruit in the garden." "Well, the analogy breaks down there," said Stark. "I was almost beginning to believe in the thing. But if it isn't that, then what. Father Briton, you are the linguist, but in Hebrew does not Ha-Adamah and Hawwah mean—?" "Of course they do. You know that as well as I." "I was never a believer. But would it be possible for the exact same proposition to maintain here as on Earth?" "All things are possible." And it was then that Ha-Adamah, the shining man, gave a wild cry: "No, no. Do not approach it. It is not allowed to eat of that one!" It was the pomegranate tree, and he was warning Langweilig away from it. "Once more, Father," said Stark, "you should be the authority; but does not the idea that it was the apple that was forbidden go back only to a medieval painting?" "It does. The name of the fruit is not mentioned in Genesis. In Hebrew exegesis, however, the pomegranate is usually indicated." "I thought so. Question the man further, Father. This is too incredible." "It is a little odd. Adam, old man, how long have you been here?" "Forever less six days is the answer that has been given to me. I never did understand the answer, however." "And have you gotten no older in all that time?" "I do not understand what 'older' is. I am as I have been from the beginning." "And do you think that you will ever die?" "To die I do not understand. I am taught that it is a property of fallen nature to die, and that does not pertain to me or mine." "And are you completely happy here?" "Perfectly happy according to my preternatural state. But I am taught that it might be possible to lose that happiness, and then to seek it vainly through all the ages. I am taught that sickness and ageing and even death could come if this happiness were ever lost. I am taught that on at least one other unfortunate world it has actually been lost." "Do you consider yourself a knowledgeable man?" "Yes, since I am the only man, and knowledge is natural to man. But I am further blessed. I have a preternatural intellect." Then Stark cut in once more: "There must be some one question you could ask him, Father. Some way to settle it. I am becoming nearly convinced." "Yes, there is a question that will settle it. Adam, old man, how about a game of checkers?" "This is hardly the time for clowning," said Stark. "I'm not clowning, Captain. How about it, Adam? I'll give you choice of colors and first move." "No. It would be no contest. I have a preternatural intellect." "Well, I beat a barber who was champion of Germantown. And I beat the champion of Morgan County, Tennessee, which is the hottest checker center on Earth. I've played against, and beaten, machines. But I never played a preternatural mind. Let's just set up the board, Adam, and have a go at it." "No. It would be no contest. I would not like to humble you." They were there for three days. They were delighted with the place. It was a world with everything, and it seemed to have only two inhabitants. They went everywhere except into the big cave. "What is there, Adam?" asked Captain Stark. "The great serpent lives there. I would not disturb him. He has long been cranky because plans he had for us did not materialize. But we are taught that should ever evil come to us, which it cannot if we persevere, it will come by him." They learned no more of the real nature of the sphere in their time there. Yet all but one of them were convinced of the reality when they left. And they talked of it as they took off. "A crowd would laugh if told of it," said Stark, "but not many would laugh if they had actually seen the place, or them. I am not a gullible man, but I am convinced of this: that this is a pristine and pure world and that ours and all the others we have visited are fallen worlds. Here are the prototypes of our first parents before their fall. They are garbed in light and innocence, and they have the happiness that we have been seeking for centuries. It would be a crime if anyone disturbed that happiness." "I too am convinced," said Steiner. "It is Paradise itself, where the lion lies down with the lamb, and where the serpent has not prevailed. It would be the darkest of crimes if we or others should play the part of the serpent, and intrude and spoil." "I am probably the most skeptical man in the world," said Casper Craig the tycoon, "but I do believe my eyes. I have been there and seen it. It is indeed an unspoiled Paradise; and it would be a crime calling to the wide heavens for vengeance for anyone to smirch in any way that perfection. "So much for that. Now to business. Gilbert, take a gram: Ninety Million Square Miles of Pristine Paradise for Sale or Lease. Farming, Ranching, exceptional opportunities for Horticulture. Gold, Silver, Iron, Earth-Type Fauna. Terms. Special Rates for Large Settlement Parties. Write, Gram, or call in person at any of our planetary offices as listed below. Ask for Brochure—Eden Acres Unlimited." Down in the great cave that Old Serpent, a two-legged one among whose names were "Snake-Oil Sam," spoke to his underlings: "It'll take them fourteen days to get back with the settlers. We'll have time to overhaul the blasters. We haven't had any well-equipped settlers for six weeks. It used to be we'd hardly have time to strip and slaughter and stow before there was another batch to take care of." "I think you'd better write me some new lines," said Adam. "I feel like a goof saying those same ones to each bunch." "You are a goof, and therefore perfect for the part. I was in show business long enough to know never to change a line too soon. I did change Adam and Eve to Ha-Adamah and Hawwah, and the apple to the pomegranate. People aren't becoming any smarter—but they are becoming better researched, and they insist on authenticity. "This is still a perfect come-on here. There is something in human nature that cannot resist the idea of a Perfect Paradise. Folks will whoop and holler to their neighbors to come in droves to spoil and mar it. It isn't greed or the desire for new land so much—though that is strong too. Mainly it is the feverish passion to befoul and poison what is unspoiled. Fortunately I am sagacious enough to take advantage of this trait. And when you start to farm a new world on a shoestring you have to acquire your equipment as you can." He looked proudly around at the great cave with its mountains and tiers of materials, heavy machinery of all sorts, titanic crates of foodstuff space-sealed; wheeled, tracked, propped, vaned and jetted vehicles; and power packs to run a world. He looked at the three dozen space ships stripped and stacked, and at the rather large pile of bone-meal in one corner. "We will have to have another lion," said Eve. "Bowser is getting old, and Marie-Yvette abuses him and gnaws his toes. And we do have to have a big-maned lion to lie down with the lamb." "I know it, Eve. The lion is a very important prop. Maybe one of the crackpot settlers will bring a new lion." "And can't you mix another kind of shining paint? This itches. It's hell." "I'm working on it." Casper Craig was still dictating the gram: "Amazing quality of longevity seemingly inherent in the locale. Climate ideal. Daylight or half-light. All twenty-one hours from Planet Delphina and from Sol. Pure water for all industrial purposes. Scenic and storied. Zoning and pre-settlement restrictions to insure congenial neighbors. A completely planned globular settlement in a near arm of our own galaxy. Low taxes and liberal credit. Financing our specialty—" "And you had better have an armed escort when you return," said Father Briton. "Why in cosmos would we want an armed escort?" "It's as phony as a seven-credit note!" "You, a man of the cloth doubt it? And us ready skeptics convinced by our senses? Why do you doubt?" "It is only the unbelieving who believe so easily in obvious frauds. Theologically unsound, dramaturgically weak, philologically impossible, zoologically rigged, salted conspicuously with gold and shot through with anachronisms. And moreover he was afraid to play me at checkers." "What?" "If I have a preternatural intellect I wouldn't be afraid of a game of checkers with anyone. Yet there was an unusual mind there somewhere; it was just that he chose not to make our acquaintance personally." "They looked at the priest thoughtfully. "But it was Paradise in one way," said Steiner at last. "How?" "All the time we were there the woman did not speak."

Describe the setting of the story.

6

In the Garden by R.A. Lafferty takes place on a planet somewhere in the universe. The three inhabitants (animals not included) have kept it isolated and deserted. There aren’t any structures, buildings, or infrastructure that would be recognizable from space. Even on land, you can’t tell this planet has been touched by human hands. Trees grow abundantly with the most delicious fruits, a fountain spouts water that is clear and clean, and lush green grass rests on the ground. Gold speckles shine on the rocks, a promise of greater treasures to be found underground. The only real mystery is the cave, which the crew of the visiting spaceship are not allowed to see. Within is the evidence of humanity: spaceships, farming equipment, and tools. However, with all this tucked away, this land can truly pass off as Paradise: untouched, unblemished, and unseen by humans.

61007

IT WAS A DULL, ROUTINE LITTLE WORLD. IT DIDN'T EVEN HAVE A CITY. EVERYTHING IT HAD WAS IN THE GARDEN BY R. A. LAFFERTY [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, March 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] The protozoic recorder chirped like a bird. Not only would there be life traces on that little moon, but it would be a lively place. So they skipped several steps in the procedure. The chordata discerner read Positive over most of the surface. There was spinal fluid on that orb, rivers of it. So again they omitted several tests and went to the cognition scanner. Would it show Thought on the body? Naturally they did not get results at once, nor did they expect to; it required a fine adjustment. But they were disappointed that they found nothing for several hours as they hovered high over the rotation. Then it came—clearly and definitely, but from quite a small location only. "Limited," said Steiner, "as though within a pale. As though there were but one city, if that is its form. Shall we follow the rest of the surface to find another, or concentrate on this? It'll be twelve hours before it's back in our ken if we let it go now." "Let's lock on this one and finish the scan. Then we can do the rest of the world to make sure we've missed nothing," said Stark. There was one more test to run, one very tricky and difficult of analysis, that with the Extraordinary Perception Locator. This was designed simply to locate a source of superior thought. But this might be so varied or so unfamiliar that often both the machine and the designer of it were puzzled as to how to read the results. The E. P. Locator had been designed by Glaser. But when the Locator had refused to read Positive when turned on the inventor himself, bad blood developed between machine and man. Glaser knew that he had extraordinary perception. He was a much honored man in his field. He told the machine so heatedly. The machine replied, with such warmth that its relays chattered, that Glaser did not have extraordinary perception; he had only ordinary perception to an extraordinary degree. There is a difference , the machine insisted. It was for this reason that Glaser used that model no more, but built others more amenable. And it was for this reason also that the owners of Little Probe had acquired the original machine so cheaply. And there was no denying that the Extraordinary Perception Locator (or Eppel) was a contrary machine. On Earth it had read Positive on a number of crack-pots, including Waxey Sax, a jazz tootler who could not even read music. But it had also read Positive on ninety per cent of the acknowledged superior minds of the Earth. In space it had been a sound guide to the unusual intelligences encountered. Yet on Suzuki-Mi it had read Positive on a two-inch-long worm, only one of them out of billions. For the countless identical worms no trace of anything at all was shown by the test. So it was with mixed expectations that Steiner locked onto the area and got a flick. He then narrowed to a smaller area (apparently one individual, though this could not be certain) and got very definite action. Eppel was busy. The machine had a touch of the ham in it, and assumed an air of importance when it ran these tests. Finally it signaled the result, the most exasperating result it ever produces: the single orange light. It was the equivalent of the shrug of the shoulders in a man. They called it the "You tell me light." So among the intelligences there was at least one that might be extraordinary, though possibly in a crackpot way. It is good to be forewarned. "Scan the remainder of the world, Steiner," said Stark, "and the rest of us will get some sleep. If you find no other spot then we will go down on that one the next time it is in position under us, in about twelve hours." "You don't want to visit any of the other areas first? Somewhere away from the thoughtful creature?" "No. The rest of the world may be dangerous. There must be a reason that thought is in one spot only. If we find no others then we will go down boldly and visit this." So they all, except Steiner, went off to their bunks then: Stark, the Captain; Gregory Gilbert, the executive officer; Wolfgang Langweilig, the engineer; Casper Craig, super-cargo, tycoon and 51% owner of the Little Probe, and F. R. Briton, S.J., a Jesuit priest who was linguist and checker champion of the craft. Dawn did not come to the moon-town. The Little Probe hovered stationary in the light and the moon-town came up under the dawn. Then the Probe went down to visit whatever was there. "There's no town," said Steiner. "Not a building. Yet we're on the track of the minds. There's nothing but a meadow and some boscage, a sort of fountain or pool, and four streams coming out of it." "Keep on towards the minds," said Stark. "They're our target." "Not a building, not two sticks or stones placed together. That looks like an Earth-type sheep there. And that looks like an Earth-lion, I'm almost afraid to say. And those two ... why, they could well be Earth-people. But with a difference. Where is that bright light coming from?" "I don't know, but they're right in the middle of it. Land here. We'll go to meet them at once. Timidity has never been an efficacious tool with us." Well, they were people. And one could only wish that all people were like them. There was a man and a woman, and they were clothed either in very bright garments or in no garments at all, but only in a very bright light. "Talk to them, Father Briton," said Stark. "You are the linguist." "Howdy," said the priest. He may or may not have been understood, but the two of them smiled at him, so he went on. "Father Briton from Philadelphia," he said, "on detached service. And you, my good man, what is your handle, your monicker, your tag?" "Ha-Adamah," said the man. "And your daughter, or niece?" It may be that the shining man frowned momentarily at this; but the woman smiled, proving that she was human. "The woman is named Hawwah," said the man. "The sheep is named sheep, the lion is named lion, the horse is named horse and the hoolock is named hoolock." "I understand. It is possible that this could go on and on. How is it that you use the English tongue?" "I have only one tongue; but it is given to us to be understood by all; by the eagle, by the squirrel, by the ass, by the English." "We happen to be bloody Yankees, but we use a borrowed tongue. You wouldn't have a drink on you for a tubful of thirsty travellers, would you?" "The fountain." "Ah—I see." But the crew all drank of the fountain to be sociable. It was water, but water that excelled, cool and with all its original bubbles like the first water ever made. "What do you make of them?" asked Stark. "Human," said Steiner. "It may even be that they are a little more than human. I don't understand that light that surrounds them. And they seem to be clothed, as it were, in dignity." "And very little else," said Father Briton, "though that light trick does serve a purpose. But I'm not sure they'd pass in Philadelphia." "Talk to them again," said Stark. "You're the linguist." "That isn't necessary here, Captain. Talk to them yourself." "Are there any other people here?" Stark asked the man. "The two of us. Man and woman." "But are there any others?" "How would there be any others? What other kind of people could there be than man and woman?" "But is there more than one man or woman?" "How could there be more than one of anything?" The captain was a little puzzled by this, but he went on doggedly: "Ha-Adamah, what do you think that we are? Are we not people?" "You are not anything till I name you. But I will name you and then you can be. You are named Captain. He is named Priest. He is named Engineer. He is named Flunky." "Thanks a lot," said Steiner. "But are we not people?" persisted Captain Stark. "No. We are the people. There are no people but two. How could there be other people?" "And the damnest thing about it," muttered Langweilig, "is, how are you going to prove him wrong? But it does give you a small feeling." "Can we have something to eat?" asked the Captain. "Pick from the trees," said Ha-Adamah, "and then it may be that you will want to sleep on the grass. Being not of human nature (which does not need sleep or rest), it may be that you require respite. But you are free to enjoy the garden and its fruits." "We will," said Captain Stark. They wandered about the place, but they were uneasy. There were the animals. The lion and lioness were enough to make one cautious, though they offered no harm. The two bears had a puzzling look, as though they wanted either to frolic with you or to mangle you. "If there are only two people here," said Casper Craig, "then it may be that the rest of the world is not dangerous at all. It looked fertile wherever we scanned it, though not so fertile as this central bit. And those rocks would bear examining." "Flecked with gold, and possibly with something else," said Stark. "A very promising site." "And everything grows here," added Steiner. "Those are Earth-fruits and I never saw finer. I've tasted the grapes and plums and pears. The figs and dates are superb, the quince is as flavorsome as a quince can be, the cherries are excellent. And I never did taste such oranges. But I haven't yet tried the—" and he stopped. "If you're thinking what I'm afraid to think," said Gilbert, "then it will be the test at least: whether we're having a pleasant dream or whether this is reality. Go ahead and eat one." "I won't be the first to eat one. You eat." "Ask him first. You ask him." "Ha-Adamah, is it allowed to eat the apples?" "Certainly. Eat. It is the finest fruit in the garden." "Well, the analogy breaks down there," said Stark. "I was almost beginning to believe in the thing. But if it isn't that, then what. Father Briton, you are the linguist, but in Hebrew does not Ha-Adamah and Hawwah mean—?" "Of course they do. You know that as well as I." "I was never a believer. But would it be possible for the exact same proposition to maintain here as on Earth?" "All things are possible." And it was then that Ha-Adamah, the shining man, gave a wild cry: "No, no. Do not approach it. It is not allowed to eat of that one!" It was the pomegranate tree, and he was warning Langweilig away from it. "Once more, Father," said Stark, "you should be the authority; but does not the idea that it was the apple that was forbidden go back only to a medieval painting?" "It does. The name of the fruit is not mentioned in Genesis. In Hebrew exegesis, however, the pomegranate is usually indicated." "I thought so. Question the man further, Father. This is too incredible." "It is a little odd. Adam, old man, how long have you been here?" "Forever less six days is the answer that has been given to me. I never did understand the answer, however." "And have you gotten no older in all that time?" "I do not understand what 'older' is. I am as I have been from the beginning." "And do you think that you will ever die?" "To die I do not understand. I am taught that it is a property of fallen nature to die, and that does not pertain to me or mine." "And are you completely happy here?" "Perfectly happy according to my preternatural state. But I am taught that it might be possible to lose that happiness, and then to seek it vainly through all the ages. I am taught that sickness and ageing and even death could come if this happiness were ever lost. I am taught that on at least one other unfortunate world it has actually been lost." "Do you consider yourself a knowledgeable man?" "Yes, since I am the only man, and knowledge is natural to man. But I am further blessed. I have a preternatural intellect." Then Stark cut in once more: "There must be some one question you could ask him, Father. Some way to settle it. I am becoming nearly convinced." "Yes, there is a question that will settle it. Adam, old man, how about a game of checkers?" "This is hardly the time for clowning," said Stark. "I'm not clowning, Captain. How about it, Adam? I'll give you choice of colors and first move." "No. It would be no contest. I have a preternatural intellect." "Well, I beat a barber who was champion of Germantown. And I beat the champion of Morgan County, Tennessee, which is the hottest checker center on Earth. I've played against, and beaten, machines. But I never played a preternatural mind. Let's just set up the board, Adam, and have a go at it." "No. It would be no contest. I would not like to humble you." They were there for three days. They were delighted with the place. It was a world with everything, and it seemed to have only two inhabitants. They went everywhere except into the big cave. "What is there, Adam?" asked Captain Stark. "The great serpent lives there. I would not disturb him. He has long been cranky because plans he had for us did not materialize. But we are taught that should ever evil come to us, which it cannot if we persevere, it will come by him." They learned no more of the real nature of the sphere in their time there. Yet all but one of them were convinced of the reality when they left. And they talked of it as they took off. "A crowd would laugh if told of it," said Stark, "but not many would laugh if they had actually seen the place, or them. I am not a gullible man, but I am convinced of this: that this is a pristine and pure world and that ours and all the others we have visited are fallen worlds. Here are the prototypes of our first parents before their fall. They are garbed in light and innocence, and they have the happiness that we have been seeking for centuries. It would be a crime if anyone disturbed that happiness." "I too am convinced," said Steiner. "It is Paradise itself, where the lion lies down with the lamb, and where the serpent has not prevailed. It would be the darkest of crimes if we or others should play the part of the serpent, and intrude and spoil." "I am probably the most skeptical man in the world," said Casper Craig the tycoon, "but I do believe my eyes. I have been there and seen it. It is indeed an unspoiled Paradise; and it would be a crime calling to the wide heavens for vengeance for anyone to smirch in any way that perfection. "So much for that. Now to business. Gilbert, take a gram: Ninety Million Square Miles of Pristine Paradise for Sale or Lease. Farming, Ranching, exceptional opportunities for Horticulture. Gold, Silver, Iron, Earth-Type Fauna. Terms. Special Rates for Large Settlement Parties. Write, Gram, or call in person at any of our planetary offices as listed below. Ask for Brochure—Eden Acres Unlimited." Down in the great cave that Old Serpent, a two-legged one among whose names were "Snake-Oil Sam," spoke to his underlings: "It'll take them fourteen days to get back with the settlers. We'll have time to overhaul the blasters. We haven't had any well-equipped settlers for six weeks. It used to be we'd hardly have time to strip and slaughter and stow before there was another batch to take care of." "I think you'd better write me some new lines," said Adam. "I feel like a goof saying those same ones to each bunch." "You are a goof, and therefore perfect for the part. I was in show business long enough to know never to change a line too soon. I did change Adam and Eve to Ha-Adamah and Hawwah, and the apple to the pomegranate. People aren't becoming any smarter—but they are becoming better researched, and they insist on authenticity. "This is still a perfect come-on here. There is something in human nature that cannot resist the idea of a Perfect Paradise. Folks will whoop and holler to their neighbors to come in droves to spoil and mar it. It isn't greed or the desire for new land so much—though that is strong too. Mainly it is the feverish passion to befoul and poison what is unspoiled. Fortunately I am sagacious enough to take advantage of this trait. And when you start to farm a new world on a shoestring you have to acquire your equipment as you can." He looked proudly around at the great cave with its mountains and tiers of materials, heavy machinery of all sorts, titanic crates of foodstuff space-sealed; wheeled, tracked, propped, vaned and jetted vehicles; and power packs to run a world. He looked at the three dozen space ships stripped and stacked, and at the rather large pile of bone-meal in one corner. "We will have to have another lion," said Eve. "Bowser is getting old, and Marie-Yvette abuses him and gnaws his toes. And we do have to have a big-maned lion to lie down with the lamb." "I know it, Eve. The lion is a very important prop. Maybe one of the crackpot settlers will bring a new lion." "And can't you mix another kind of shining paint? This itches. It's hell." "I'm working on it." Casper Craig was still dictating the gram: "Amazing quality of longevity seemingly inherent in the locale. Climate ideal. Daylight or half-light. All twenty-one hours from Planet Delphina and from Sol. Pure water for all industrial purposes. Scenic and storied. Zoning and pre-settlement restrictions to insure congenial neighbors. A completely planned globular settlement in a near arm of our own galaxy. Low taxes and liberal credit. Financing our specialty—" "And you had better have an armed escort when you return," said Father Briton. "Why in cosmos would we want an armed escort?" "It's as phony as a seven-credit note!" "You, a man of the cloth doubt it? And us ready skeptics convinced by our senses? Why do you doubt?" "It is only the unbelieving who believe so easily in obvious frauds. Theologically unsound, dramaturgically weak, philologically impossible, zoologically rigged, salted conspicuously with gold and shot through with anachronisms. And moreover he was afraid to play me at checkers." "What?" "If I have a preternatural intellect I wouldn't be afraid of a game of checkers with anyone. Yet there was an unusual mind there somewhere; it was just that he chose not to make our acquaintance personally." "They looked at the priest thoughtfully. "But it was Paradise in one way," said Steiner at last. "How?" "All the time we were there the woman did not speak."

How do religion and religious faith contribute to the story?

5

Christianity is a central component of the story. The heart of the narrative revolves around the description of the world as a replica of the biblical Garden of Eden. The author goes into extensive detail regarding the aspects of the garden and its inhabitants and how they conform to aspects of the Genesis narrative and how it was understood by religious analysis. It is heavily suggested that here, the Serpent did not succeed in convincing man to sin and fall from grace as was the case in the biblical narrative. As a result, Ha-Adamah and Hawwah (the Hebrew names for Adam and Eve) remain clothed in light and still enjoy the preternatural gifts of creation including a highly advanced intellect, immortality and even an illuminated appearance. It is revealed that this depiction is a deception on the part of the moon’s inhabitants. Interestingly, the 4 non-believers on the crew are the most ready to believe that the state of affairs on the planet is indeed supernatural. It is only the clever priest who possesses faith, but employs the skepticism necessary to see through the fraud.

61007

IT WAS A DULL, ROUTINE LITTLE WORLD. IT DIDN'T EVEN HAVE A CITY. EVERYTHING IT HAD WAS IN THE GARDEN BY R. A. LAFFERTY [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, March 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] The protozoic recorder chirped like a bird. Not only would there be life traces on that little moon, but it would be a lively place. So they skipped several steps in the procedure. The chordata discerner read Positive over most of the surface. There was spinal fluid on that orb, rivers of it. So again they omitted several tests and went to the cognition scanner. Would it show Thought on the body? Naturally they did not get results at once, nor did they expect to; it required a fine adjustment. But they were disappointed that they found nothing for several hours as they hovered high over the rotation. Then it came—clearly and definitely, but from quite a small location only. "Limited," said Steiner, "as though within a pale. As though there were but one city, if that is its form. Shall we follow the rest of the surface to find another, or concentrate on this? It'll be twelve hours before it's back in our ken if we let it go now." "Let's lock on this one and finish the scan. Then we can do the rest of the world to make sure we've missed nothing," said Stark. There was one more test to run, one very tricky and difficult of analysis, that with the Extraordinary Perception Locator. This was designed simply to locate a source of superior thought. But this might be so varied or so unfamiliar that often both the machine and the designer of it were puzzled as to how to read the results. The E. P. Locator had been designed by Glaser. But when the Locator had refused to read Positive when turned on the inventor himself, bad blood developed between machine and man. Glaser knew that he had extraordinary perception. He was a much honored man in his field. He told the machine so heatedly. The machine replied, with such warmth that its relays chattered, that Glaser did not have extraordinary perception; he had only ordinary perception to an extraordinary degree. There is a difference , the machine insisted. It was for this reason that Glaser used that model no more, but built others more amenable. And it was for this reason also that the owners of Little Probe had acquired the original machine so cheaply. And there was no denying that the Extraordinary Perception Locator (or Eppel) was a contrary machine. On Earth it had read Positive on a number of crack-pots, including Waxey Sax, a jazz tootler who could not even read music. But it had also read Positive on ninety per cent of the acknowledged superior minds of the Earth. In space it had been a sound guide to the unusual intelligences encountered. Yet on Suzuki-Mi it had read Positive on a two-inch-long worm, only one of them out of billions. For the countless identical worms no trace of anything at all was shown by the test. So it was with mixed expectations that Steiner locked onto the area and got a flick. He then narrowed to a smaller area (apparently one individual, though this could not be certain) and got very definite action. Eppel was busy. The machine had a touch of the ham in it, and assumed an air of importance when it ran these tests. Finally it signaled the result, the most exasperating result it ever produces: the single orange light. It was the equivalent of the shrug of the shoulders in a man. They called it the "You tell me light." So among the intelligences there was at least one that might be extraordinary, though possibly in a crackpot way. It is good to be forewarned. "Scan the remainder of the world, Steiner," said Stark, "and the rest of us will get some sleep. If you find no other spot then we will go down on that one the next time it is in position under us, in about twelve hours." "You don't want to visit any of the other areas first? Somewhere away from the thoughtful creature?" "No. The rest of the world may be dangerous. There must be a reason that thought is in one spot only. If we find no others then we will go down boldly and visit this." So they all, except Steiner, went off to their bunks then: Stark, the Captain; Gregory Gilbert, the executive officer; Wolfgang Langweilig, the engineer; Casper Craig, super-cargo, tycoon and 51% owner of the Little Probe, and F. R. Briton, S.J., a Jesuit priest who was linguist and checker champion of the craft. Dawn did not come to the moon-town. The Little Probe hovered stationary in the light and the moon-town came up under the dawn. Then the Probe went down to visit whatever was there. "There's no town," said Steiner. "Not a building. Yet we're on the track of the minds. There's nothing but a meadow and some boscage, a sort of fountain or pool, and four streams coming out of it." "Keep on towards the minds," said Stark. "They're our target." "Not a building, not two sticks or stones placed together. That looks like an Earth-type sheep there. And that looks like an Earth-lion, I'm almost afraid to say. And those two ... why, they could well be Earth-people. But with a difference. Where is that bright light coming from?" "I don't know, but they're right in the middle of it. Land here. We'll go to meet them at once. Timidity has never been an efficacious tool with us." Well, they were people. And one could only wish that all people were like them. There was a man and a woman, and they were clothed either in very bright garments or in no garments at all, but only in a very bright light. "Talk to them, Father Briton," said Stark. "You are the linguist." "Howdy," said the priest. He may or may not have been understood, but the two of them smiled at him, so he went on. "Father Briton from Philadelphia," he said, "on detached service. And you, my good man, what is your handle, your monicker, your tag?" "Ha-Adamah," said the man. "And your daughter, or niece?" It may be that the shining man frowned momentarily at this; but the woman smiled, proving that she was human. "The woman is named Hawwah," said the man. "The sheep is named sheep, the lion is named lion, the horse is named horse and the hoolock is named hoolock." "I understand. It is possible that this could go on and on. How is it that you use the English tongue?" "I have only one tongue; but it is given to us to be understood by all; by the eagle, by the squirrel, by the ass, by the English." "We happen to be bloody Yankees, but we use a borrowed tongue. You wouldn't have a drink on you for a tubful of thirsty travellers, would you?" "The fountain." "Ah—I see." But the crew all drank of the fountain to be sociable. It was water, but water that excelled, cool and with all its original bubbles like the first water ever made. "What do you make of them?" asked Stark. "Human," said Steiner. "It may even be that they are a little more than human. I don't understand that light that surrounds them. And they seem to be clothed, as it were, in dignity." "And very little else," said Father Briton, "though that light trick does serve a purpose. But I'm not sure they'd pass in Philadelphia." "Talk to them again," said Stark. "You're the linguist." "That isn't necessary here, Captain. Talk to them yourself." "Are there any other people here?" Stark asked the man. "The two of us. Man and woman." "But are there any others?" "How would there be any others? What other kind of people could there be than man and woman?" "But is there more than one man or woman?" "How could there be more than one of anything?" The captain was a little puzzled by this, but he went on doggedly: "Ha-Adamah, what do you think that we are? Are we not people?" "You are not anything till I name you. But I will name you and then you can be. You are named Captain. He is named Priest. He is named Engineer. He is named Flunky." "Thanks a lot," said Steiner. "But are we not people?" persisted Captain Stark. "No. We are the people. There are no people but two. How could there be other people?" "And the damnest thing about it," muttered Langweilig, "is, how are you going to prove him wrong? But it does give you a small feeling." "Can we have something to eat?" asked the Captain. "Pick from the trees," said Ha-Adamah, "and then it may be that you will want to sleep on the grass. Being not of human nature (which does not need sleep or rest), it may be that you require respite. But you are free to enjoy the garden and its fruits." "We will," said Captain Stark. They wandered about the place, but they were uneasy. There were the animals. The lion and lioness were enough to make one cautious, though they offered no harm. The two bears had a puzzling look, as though they wanted either to frolic with you or to mangle you. "If there are only two people here," said Casper Craig, "then it may be that the rest of the world is not dangerous at all. It looked fertile wherever we scanned it, though not so fertile as this central bit. And those rocks would bear examining." "Flecked with gold, and possibly with something else," said Stark. "A very promising site." "And everything grows here," added Steiner. "Those are Earth-fruits and I never saw finer. I've tasted the grapes and plums and pears. The figs and dates are superb, the quince is as flavorsome as a quince can be, the cherries are excellent. And I never did taste such oranges. But I haven't yet tried the—" and he stopped. "If you're thinking what I'm afraid to think," said Gilbert, "then it will be the test at least: whether we're having a pleasant dream or whether this is reality. Go ahead and eat one." "I won't be the first to eat one. You eat." "Ask him first. You ask him." "Ha-Adamah, is it allowed to eat the apples?" "Certainly. Eat. It is the finest fruit in the garden." "Well, the analogy breaks down there," said Stark. "I was almost beginning to believe in the thing. But if it isn't that, then what. Father Briton, you are the linguist, but in Hebrew does not Ha-Adamah and Hawwah mean—?" "Of course they do. You know that as well as I." "I was never a believer. But would it be possible for the exact same proposition to maintain here as on Earth?" "All things are possible." And it was then that Ha-Adamah, the shining man, gave a wild cry: "No, no. Do not approach it. It is not allowed to eat of that one!" It was the pomegranate tree, and he was warning Langweilig away from it. "Once more, Father," said Stark, "you should be the authority; but does not the idea that it was the apple that was forbidden go back only to a medieval painting?" "It does. The name of the fruit is not mentioned in Genesis. In Hebrew exegesis, however, the pomegranate is usually indicated." "I thought so. Question the man further, Father. This is too incredible." "It is a little odd. Adam, old man, how long have you been here?" "Forever less six days is the answer that has been given to me. I never did understand the answer, however." "And have you gotten no older in all that time?" "I do not understand what 'older' is. I am as I have been from the beginning." "And do you think that you will ever die?" "To die I do not understand. I am taught that it is a property of fallen nature to die, and that does not pertain to me or mine." "And are you completely happy here?" "Perfectly happy according to my preternatural state. But I am taught that it might be possible to lose that happiness, and then to seek it vainly through all the ages. I am taught that sickness and ageing and even death could come if this happiness were ever lost. I am taught that on at least one other unfortunate world it has actually been lost." "Do you consider yourself a knowledgeable man?" "Yes, since I am the only man, and knowledge is natural to man. But I am further blessed. I have a preternatural intellect." Then Stark cut in once more: "There must be some one question you could ask him, Father. Some way to settle it. I am becoming nearly convinced." "Yes, there is a question that will settle it. Adam, old man, how about a game of checkers?" "This is hardly the time for clowning," said Stark. "I'm not clowning, Captain. How about it, Adam? I'll give you choice of colors and first move." "No. It would be no contest. I have a preternatural intellect." "Well, I beat a barber who was champion of Germantown. And I beat the champion of Morgan County, Tennessee, which is the hottest checker center on Earth. I've played against, and beaten, machines. But I never played a preternatural mind. Let's just set up the board, Adam, and have a go at it." "No. It would be no contest. I would not like to humble you." They were there for three days. They were delighted with the place. It was a world with everything, and it seemed to have only two inhabitants. They went everywhere except into the big cave. "What is there, Adam?" asked Captain Stark. "The great serpent lives there. I would not disturb him. He has long been cranky because plans he had for us did not materialize. But we are taught that should ever evil come to us, which it cannot if we persevere, it will come by him." They learned no more of the real nature of the sphere in their time there. Yet all but one of them were convinced of the reality when they left. And they talked of it as they took off. "A crowd would laugh if told of it," said Stark, "but not many would laugh if they had actually seen the place, or them. I am not a gullible man, but I am convinced of this: that this is a pristine and pure world and that ours and all the others we have visited are fallen worlds. Here are the prototypes of our first parents before their fall. They are garbed in light and innocence, and they have the happiness that we have been seeking for centuries. It would be a crime if anyone disturbed that happiness." "I too am convinced," said Steiner. "It is Paradise itself, where the lion lies down with the lamb, and where the serpent has not prevailed. It would be the darkest of crimes if we or others should play the part of the serpent, and intrude and spoil." "I am probably the most skeptical man in the world," said Casper Craig the tycoon, "but I do believe my eyes. I have been there and seen it. It is indeed an unspoiled Paradise; and it would be a crime calling to the wide heavens for vengeance for anyone to smirch in any way that perfection. "So much for that. Now to business. Gilbert, take a gram: Ninety Million Square Miles of Pristine Paradise for Sale or Lease. Farming, Ranching, exceptional opportunities for Horticulture. Gold, Silver, Iron, Earth-Type Fauna. Terms. Special Rates for Large Settlement Parties. Write, Gram, or call in person at any of our planetary offices as listed below. Ask for Brochure—Eden Acres Unlimited." Down in the great cave that Old Serpent, a two-legged one among whose names were "Snake-Oil Sam," spoke to his underlings: "It'll take them fourteen days to get back with the settlers. We'll have time to overhaul the blasters. We haven't had any well-equipped settlers for six weeks. It used to be we'd hardly have time to strip and slaughter and stow before there was another batch to take care of." "I think you'd better write me some new lines," said Adam. "I feel like a goof saying those same ones to each bunch." "You are a goof, and therefore perfect for the part. I was in show business long enough to know never to change a line too soon. I did change Adam and Eve to Ha-Adamah and Hawwah, and the apple to the pomegranate. People aren't becoming any smarter—but they are becoming better researched, and they insist on authenticity. "This is still a perfect come-on here. There is something in human nature that cannot resist the idea of a Perfect Paradise. Folks will whoop and holler to their neighbors to come in droves to spoil and mar it. It isn't greed or the desire for new land so much—though that is strong too. Mainly it is the feverish passion to befoul and poison what is unspoiled. Fortunately I am sagacious enough to take advantage of this trait. And when you start to farm a new world on a shoestring you have to acquire your equipment as you can." He looked proudly around at the great cave with its mountains and tiers of materials, heavy machinery of all sorts, titanic crates of foodstuff space-sealed; wheeled, tracked, propped, vaned and jetted vehicles; and power packs to run a world. He looked at the three dozen space ships stripped and stacked, and at the rather large pile of bone-meal in one corner. "We will have to have another lion," said Eve. "Bowser is getting old, and Marie-Yvette abuses him and gnaws his toes. And we do have to have a big-maned lion to lie down with the lamb." "I know it, Eve. The lion is a very important prop. Maybe one of the crackpot settlers will bring a new lion." "And can't you mix another kind of shining paint? This itches. It's hell." "I'm working on it." Casper Craig was still dictating the gram: "Amazing quality of longevity seemingly inherent in the locale. Climate ideal. Daylight or half-light. All twenty-one hours from Planet Delphina and from Sol. Pure water for all industrial purposes. Scenic and storied. Zoning and pre-settlement restrictions to insure congenial neighbors. A completely planned globular settlement in a near arm of our own galaxy. Low taxes and liberal credit. Financing our specialty—" "And you had better have an armed escort when you return," said Father Briton. "Why in cosmos would we want an armed escort?" "It's as phony as a seven-credit note!" "You, a man of the cloth doubt it? And us ready skeptics convinced by our senses? Why do you doubt?" "It is only the unbelieving who believe so easily in obvious frauds. Theologically unsound, dramaturgically weak, philologically impossible, zoologically rigged, salted conspicuously with gold and shot through with anachronisms. And moreover he was afraid to play me at checkers." "What?" "If I have a preternatural intellect I wouldn't be afraid of a game of checkers with anyone. Yet there was an unusual mind there somewhere; it was just that he chose not to make our acquaintance personally." "They looked at the priest thoughtfully. "But it was Paradise in one way," said Steiner at last. "How?" "All the time we were there the woman did not speak."

How do religion and religious faith contribute to the story?

1

Snake-Oil Sam, the mastermind behind the ruse, realizes that the visitors who come to the new world will immediately make connections to the Garden of Eden if there are enough clues to point them in that direction. In that way, the story demonstrates that people are susceptible to believing in an already established story or trope, regardless of how impossible it seems. Since the settlers are familiar with the Bible and the famous story of Adam and Eve, they are preconditioned to believe that another Adam and Eve may exist in a separate world, a world that has yet to be tainted with sin. The priest is the only character that sees through Adam and Eve’s show. Although it’s strange that the religious man in the group would be the most skeptical, it’s clear that he has a keen eye for details. He purposefully asks Adam to play checkers with him to test his supernatural intellect, and when Adam refuses, he realizes that he cannot be who he says he is. Perhaps the priest has the most to lose in believing in this illusion, so his refusal to take the con artists at their word shows his true dedication to Christianity.

61007

IT WAS A DULL, ROUTINE LITTLE WORLD. IT DIDN'T EVEN HAVE A CITY. EVERYTHING IT HAD WAS IN THE GARDEN BY R. A. LAFFERTY [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, March 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] The protozoic recorder chirped like a bird. Not only would there be life traces on that little moon, but it would be a lively place. So they skipped several steps in the procedure. The chordata discerner read Positive over most of the surface. There was spinal fluid on that orb, rivers of it. So again they omitted several tests and went to the cognition scanner. Would it show Thought on the body? Naturally they did not get results at once, nor did they expect to; it required a fine adjustment. But they were disappointed that they found nothing for several hours as they hovered high over the rotation. Then it came—clearly and definitely, but from quite a small location only. "Limited," said Steiner, "as though within a pale. As though there were but one city, if that is its form. Shall we follow the rest of the surface to find another, or concentrate on this? It'll be twelve hours before it's back in our ken if we let it go now." "Let's lock on this one and finish the scan. Then we can do the rest of the world to make sure we've missed nothing," said Stark. There was one more test to run, one very tricky and difficult of analysis, that with the Extraordinary Perception Locator. This was designed simply to locate a source of superior thought. But this might be so varied or so unfamiliar that often both the machine and the designer of it were puzzled as to how to read the results. The E. P. Locator had been designed by Glaser. But when the Locator had refused to read Positive when turned on the inventor himself, bad blood developed between machine and man. Glaser knew that he had extraordinary perception. He was a much honored man in his field. He told the machine so heatedly. The machine replied, with such warmth that its relays chattered, that Glaser did not have extraordinary perception; he had only ordinary perception to an extraordinary degree. There is a difference , the machine insisted. It was for this reason that Glaser used that model no more, but built others more amenable. And it was for this reason also that the owners of Little Probe had acquired the original machine so cheaply. And there was no denying that the Extraordinary Perception Locator (or Eppel) was a contrary machine. On Earth it had read Positive on a number of crack-pots, including Waxey Sax, a jazz tootler who could not even read music. But it had also read Positive on ninety per cent of the acknowledged superior minds of the Earth. In space it had been a sound guide to the unusual intelligences encountered. Yet on Suzuki-Mi it had read Positive on a two-inch-long worm, only one of them out of billions. For the countless identical worms no trace of anything at all was shown by the test. So it was with mixed expectations that Steiner locked onto the area and got a flick. He then narrowed to a smaller area (apparently one individual, though this could not be certain) and got very definite action. Eppel was busy. The machine had a touch of the ham in it, and assumed an air of importance when it ran these tests. Finally it signaled the result, the most exasperating result it ever produces: the single orange light. It was the equivalent of the shrug of the shoulders in a man. They called it the "You tell me light." So among the intelligences there was at least one that might be extraordinary, though possibly in a crackpot way. It is good to be forewarned. "Scan the remainder of the world, Steiner," said Stark, "and the rest of us will get some sleep. If you find no other spot then we will go down on that one the next time it is in position under us, in about twelve hours." "You don't want to visit any of the other areas first? Somewhere away from the thoughtful creature?" "No. The rest of the world may be dangerous. There must be a reason that thought is in one spot only. If we find no others then we will go down boldly and visit this." So they all, except Steiner, went off to their bunks then: Stark, the Captain; Gregory Gilbert, the executive officer; Wolfgang Langweilig, the engineer; Casper Craig, super-cargo, tycoon and 51% owner of the Little Probe, and F. R. Briton, S.J., a Jesuit priest who was linguist and checker champion of the craft. Dawn did not come to the moon-town. The Little Probe hovered stationary in the light and the moon-town came up under the dawn. Then the Probe went down to visit whatever was there. "There's no town," said Steiner. "Not a building. Yet we're on the track of the minds. There's nothing but a meadow and some boscage, a sort of fountain or pool, and four streams coming out of it." "Keep on towards the minds," said Stark. "They're our target." "Not a building, not two sticks or stones placed together. That looks like an Earth-type sheep there. And that looks like an Earth-lion, I'm almost afraid to say. And those two ... why, they could well be Earth-people. But with a difference. Where is that bright light coming from?" "I don't know, but they're right in the middle of it. Land here. We'll go to meet them at once. Timidity has never been an efficacious tool with us." Well, they were people. And one could only wish that all people were like them. There was a man and a woman, and they were clothed either in very bright garments or in no garments at all, but only in a very bright light. "Talk to them, Father Briton," said Stark. "You are the linguist." "Howdy," said the priest. He may or may not have been understood, but the two of them smiled at him, so he went on. "Father Briton from Philadelphia," he said, "on detached service. And you, my good man, what is your handle, your monicker, your tag?" "Ha-Adamah," said the man. "And your daughter, or niece?" It may be that the shining man frowned momentarily at this; but the woman smiled, proving that she was human. "The woman is named Hawwah," said the man. "The sheep is named sheep, the lion is named lion, the horse is named horse and the hoolock is named hoolock." "I understand. It is possible that this could go on and on. How is it that you use the English tongue?" "I have only one tongue; but it is given to us to be understood by all; by the eagle, by the squirrel, by the ass, by the English." "We happen to be bloody Yankees, but we use a borrowed tongue. You wouldn't have a drink on you for a tubful of thirsty travellers, would you?" "The fountain." "Ah—I see." But the crew all drank of the fountain to be sociable. It was water, but water that excelled, cool and with all its original bubbles like the first water ever made. "What do you make of them?" asked Stark. "Human," said Steiner. "It may even be that they are a little more than human. I don't understand that light that surrounds them. And they seem to be clothed, as it were, in dignity." "And very little else," said Father Briton, "though that light trick does serve a purpose. But I'm not sure they'd pass in Philadelphia." "Talk to them again," said Stark. "You're the linguist." "That isn't necessary here, Captain. Talk to them yourself." "Are there any other people here?" Stark asked the man. "The two of us. Man and woman." "But are there any others?" "How would there be any others? What other kind of people could there be than man and woman?" "But is there more than one man or woman?" "How could there be more than one of anything?" The captain was a little puzzled by this, but he went on doggedly: "Ha-Adamah, what do you think that we are? Are we not people?" "You are not anything till I name you. But I will name you and then you can be. You are named Captain. He is named Priest. He is named Engineer. He is named Flunky." "Thanks a lot," said Steiner. "But are we not people?" persisted Captain Stark. "No. We are the people. There are no people but two. How could there be other people?" "And the damnest thing about it," muttered Langweilig, "is, how are you going to prove him wrong? But it does give you a small feeling." "Can we have something to eat?" asked the Captain. "Pick from the trees," said Ha-Adamah, "and then it may be that you will want to sleep on the grass. Being not of human nature (which does not need sleep or rest), it may be that you require respite. But you are free to enjoy the garden and its fruits." "We will," said Captain Stark. They wandered about the place, but they were uneasy. There were the animals. The lion and lioness were enough to make one cautious, though they offered no harm. The two bears had a puzzling look, as though they wanted either to frolic with you or to mangle you. "If there are only two people here," said Casper Craig, "then it may be that the rest of the world is not dangerous at all. It looked fertile wherever we scanned it, though not so fertile as this central bit. And those rocks would bear examining." "Flecked with gold, and possibly with something else," said Stark. "A very promising site." "And everything grows here," added Steiner. "Those are Earth-fruits and I never saw finer. I've tasted the grapes and plums and pears. The figs and dates are superb, the quince is as flavorsome as a quince can be, the cherries are excellent. And I never did taste such oranges. But I haven't yet tried the—" and he stopped. "If you're thinking what I'm afraid to think," said Gilbert, "then it will be the test at least: whether we're having a pleasant dream or whether this is reality. Go ahead and eat one." "I won't be the first to eat one. You eat." "Ask him first. You ask him." "Ha-Adamah, is it allowed to eat the apples?" "Certainly. Eat. It is the finest fruit in the garden." "Well, the analogy breaks down there," said Stark. "I was almost beginning to believe in the thing. But if it isn't that, then what. Father Briton, you are the linguist, but in Hebrew does not Ha-Adamah and Hawwah mean—?" "Of course they do. You know that as well as I." "I was never a believer. But would it be possible for the exact same proposition to maintain here as on Earth?" "All things are possible." And it was then that Ha-Adamah, the shining man, gave a wild cry: "No, no. Do not approach it. It is not allowed to eat of that one!" It was the pomegranate tree, and he was warning Langweilig away from it. "Once more, Father," said Stark, "you should be the authority; but does not the idea that it was the apple that was forbidden go back only to a medieval painting?" "It does. The name of the fruit is not mentioned in Genesis. In Hebrew exegesis, however, the pomegranate is usually indicated." "I thought so. Question the man further, Father. This is too incredible." "It is a little odd. Adam, old man, how long have you been here?" "Forever less six days is the answer that has been given to me. I never did understand the answer, however." "And have you gotten no older in all that time?" "I do not understand what 'older' is. I am as I have been from the beginning." "And do you think that you will ever die?" "To die I do not understand. I am taught that it is a property of fallen nature to die, and that does not pertain to me or mine." "And are you completely happy here?" "Perfectly happy according to my preternatural state. But I am taught that it might be possible to lose that happiness, and then to seek it vainly through all the ages. I am taught that sickness and ageing and even death could come if this happiness were ever lost. I am taught that on at least one other unfortunate world it has actually been lost." "Do you consider yourself a knowledgeable man?" "Yes, since I am the only man, and knowledge is natural to man. But I am further blessed. I have a preternatural intellect." Then Stark cut in once more: "There must be some one question you could ask him, Father. Some way to settle it. I am becoming nearly convinced." "Yes, there is a question that will settle it. Adam, old man, how about a game of checkers?" "This is hardly the time for clowning," said Stark. "I'm not clowning, Captain. How about it, Adam? I'll give you choice of colors and first move." "No. It would be no contest. I have a preternatural intellect." "Well, I beat a barber who was champion of Germantown. And I beat the champion of Morgan County, Tennessee, which is the hottest checker center on Earth. I've played against, and beaten, machines. But I never played a preternatural mind. Let's just set up the board, Adam, and have a go at it." "No. It would be no contest. I would not like to humble you." They were there for three days. They were delighted with the place. It was a world with everything, and it seemed to have only two inhabitants. They went everywhere except into the big cave. "What is there, Adam?" asked Captain Stark. "The great serpent lives there. I would not disturb him. He has long been cranky because plans he had for us did not materialize. But we are taught that should ever evil come to us, which it cannot if we persevere, it will come by him." They learned no more of the real nature of the sphere in their time there. Yet all but one of them were convinced of the reality when they left. And they talked of it as they took off. "A crowd would laugh if told of it," said Stark, "but not many would laugh if they had actually seen the place, or them. I am not a gullible man, but I am convinced of this: that this is a pristine and pure world and that ours and all the others we have visited are fallen worlds. Here are the prototypes of our first parents before their fall. They are garbed in light and innocence, and they have the happiness that we have been seeking for centuries. It would be a crime if anyone disturbed that happiness." "I too am convinced," said Steiner. "It is Paradise itself, where the lion lies down with the lamb, and where the serpent has not prevailed. It would be the darkest of crimes if we or others should play the part of the serpent, and intrude and spoil." "I am probably the most skeptical man in the world," said Casper Craig the tycoon, "but I do believe my eyes. I have been there and seen it. It is indeed an unspoiled Paradise; and it would be a crime calling to the wide heavens for vengeance for anyone to smirch in any way that perfection. "So much for that. Now to business. Gilbert, take a gram: Ninety Million Square Miles of Pristine Paradise for Sale or Lease. Farming, Ranching, exceptional opportunities for Horticulture. Gold, Silver, Iron, Earth-Type Fauna. Terms. Special Rates for Large Settlement Parties. Write, Gram, or call in person at any of our planetary offices as listed below. Ask for Brochure—Eden Acres Unlimited." Down in the great cave that Old Serpent, a two-legged one among whose names were "Snake-Oil Sam," spoke to his underlings: "It'll take them fourteen days to get back with the settlers. We'll have time to overhaul the blasters. We haven't had any well-equipped settlers for six weeks. It used to be we'd hardly have time to strip and slaughter and stow before there was another batch to take care of." "I think you'd better write me some new lines," said Adam. "I feel like a goof saying those same ones to each bunch." "You are a goof, and therefore perfect for the part. I was in show business long enough to know never to change a line too soon. I did change Adam and Eve to Ha-Adamah and Hawwah, and the apple to the pomegranate. People aren't becoming any smarter—but they are becoming better researched, and they insist on authenticity. "This is still a perfect come-on here. There is something in human nature that cannot resist the idea of a Perfect Paradise. Folks will whoop and holler to their neighbors to come in droves to spoil and mar it. It isn't greed or the desire for new land so much—though that is strong too. Mainly it is the feverish passion to befoul and poison what is unspoiled. Fortunately I am sagacious enough to take advantage of this trait. And when you start to farm a new world on a shoestring you have to acquire your equipment as you can." He looked proudly around at the great cave with its mountains and tiers of materials, heavy machinery of all sorts, titanic crates of foodstuff space-sealed; wheeled, tracked, propped, vaned and jetted vehicles; and power packs to run a world. He looked at the three dozen space ships stripped and stacked, and at the rather large pile of bone-meal in one corner. "We will have to have another lion," said Eve. "Bowser is getting old, and Marie-Yvette abuses him and gnaws his toes. And we do have to have a big-maned lion to lie down with the lamb." "I know it, Eve. The lion is a very important prop. Maybe one of the crackpot settlers will bring a new lion." "And can't you mix another kind of shining paint? This itches. It's hell." "I'm working on it." Casper Craig was still dictating the gram: "Amazing quality of longevity seemingly inherent in the locale. Climate ideal. Daylight or half-light. All twenty-one hours from Planet Delphina and from Sol. Pure water for all industrial purposes. Scenic and storied. Zoning and pre-settlement restrictions to insure congenial neighbors. A completely planned globular settlement in a near arm of our own galaxy. Low taxes and liberal credit. Financing our specialty—" "And you had better have an armed escort when you return," said Father Briton. "Why in cosmos would we want an armed escort?" "It's as phony as a seven-credit note!" "You, a man of the cloth doubt it? And us ready skeptics convinced by our senses? Why do you doubt?" "It is only the unbelieving who believe so easily in obvious frauds. Theologically unsound, dramaturgically weak, philologically impossible, zoologically rigged, salted conspicuously with gold and shot through with anachronisms. And moreover he was afraid to play me at checkers." "What?" "If I have a preternatural intellect I wouldn't be afraid of a game of checkers with anyone. Yet there was an unusual mind there somewhere; it was just that he chose not to make our acquaintance personally." "They looked at the priest thoughtfully. "But it was Paradise in one way," said Steiner at last. "How?" "All the time we were there the woman did not speak."

How do religion and religious faith contribute to the story?

3

The people on the surface of the moon that the crew of the Little Probe is investigating are part of a very detailed ploy to replicate the biblical story of Adam and Eve. This religious story served as a recognizable type of paradise, which the serpent used to his advantage, knowing that humans would be drawn to something that they thought was perfect. All of the details of the facade were carefully designed around an attempt to make an authentic, tempting environment. This included changing some details from the English-translated version of the biblical story, including giving the people their Hebrew names of Ha Adamah and Hawwah. The other major point of religion in the story is the Jesuit priest who is onboard the Little Probe. It is Father Briton who is the skeptic, asking questions during his stay on the surface to try to uncover the truth of the situation. The rest of the crew are surprised that it is the religious man who is skeptical of the reality of the moon, but he convinces them that he is right, having thought carefully about every detail of every interaction they had on the surface.

61007

IT WAS A DULL, ROUTINE LITTLE WORLD. IT DIDN'T EVEN HAVE A CITY. EVERYTHING IT HAD WAS IN THE GARDEN BY R. A. LAFFERTY [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, March 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] The protozoic recorder chirped like a bird. Not only would there be life traces on that little moon, but it would be a lively place. So they skipped several steps in the procedure. The chordata discerner read Positive over most of the surface. There was spinal fluid on that orb, rivers of it. So again they omitted several tests and went to the cognition scanner. Would it show Thought on the body? Naturally they did not get results at once, nor did they expect to; it required a fine adjustment. But they were disappointed that they found nothing for several hours as they hovered high over the rotation. Then it came—clearly and definitely, but from quite a small location only. "Limited," said Steiner, "as though within a pale. As though there were but one city, if that is its form. Shall we follow the rest of the surface to find another, or concentrate on this? It'll be twelve hours before it's back in our ken if we let it go now." "Let's lock on this one and finish the scan. Then we can do the rest of the world to make sure we've missed nothing," said Stark. There was one more test to run, one very tricky and difficult of analysis, that with the Extraordinary Perception Locator. This was designed simply to locate a source of superior thought. But this might be so varied or so unfamiliar that often both the machine and the designer of it were puzzled as to how to read the results. The E. P. Locator had been designed by Glaser. But when the Locator had refused to read Positive when turned on the inventor himself, bad blood developed between machine and man. Glaser knew that he had extraordinary perception. He was a much honored man in his field. He told the machine so heatedly. The machine replied, with such warmth that its relays chattered, that Glaser did not have extraordinary perception; he had only ordinary perception to an extraordinary degree. There is a difference , the machine insisted. It was for this reason that Glaser used that model no more, but built others more amenable. And it was for this reason also that the owners of Little Probe had acquired the original machine so cheaply. And there was no denying that the Extraordinary Perception Locator (or Eppel) was a contrary machine. On Earth it had read Positive on a number of crack-pots, including Waxey Sax, a jazz tootler who could not even read music. But it had also read Positive on ninety per cent of the acknowledged superior minds of the Earth. In space it had been a sound guide to the unusual intelligences encountered. Yet on Suzuki-Mi it had read Positive on a two-inch-long worm, only one of them out of billions. For the countless identical worms no trace of anything at all was shown by the test. So it was with mixed expectations that Steiner locked onto the area and got a flick. He then narrowed to a smaller area (apparently one individual, though this could not be certain) and got very definite action. Eppel was busy. The machine had a touch of the ham in it, and assumed an air of importance when it ran these tests. Finally it signaled the result, the most exasperating result it ever produces: the single orange light. It was the equivalent of the shrug of the shoulders in a man. They called it the "You tell me light." So among the intelligences there was at least one that might be extraordinary, though possibly in a crackpot way. It is good to be forewarned. "Scan the remainder of the world, Steiner," said Stark, "and the rest of us will get some sleep. If you find no other spot then we will go down on that one the next time it is in position under us, in about twelve hours." "You don't want to visit any of the other areas first? Somewhere away from the thoughtful creature?" "No. The rest of the world may be dangerous. There must be a reason that thought is in one spot only. If we find no others then we will go down boldly and visit this." So they all, except Steiner, went off to their bunks then: Stark, the Captain; Gregory Gilbert, the executive officer; Wolfgang Langweilig, the engineer; Casper Craig, super-cargo, tycoon and 51% owner of the Little Probe, and F. R. Briton, S.J., a Jesuit priest who was linguist and checker champion of the craft. Dawn did not come to the moon-town. The Little Probe hovered stationary in the light and the moon-town came up under the dawn. Then the Probe went down to visit whatever was there. "There's no town," said Steiner. "Not a building. Yet we're on the track of the minds. There's nothing but a meadow and some boscage, a sort of fountain or pool, and four streams coming out of it." "Keep on towards the minds," said Stark. "They're our target." "Not a building, not two sticks or stones placed together. That looks like an Earth-type sheep there. And that looks like an Earth-lion, I'm almost afraid to say. And those two ... why, they could well be Earth-people. But with a difference. Where is that bright light coming from?" "I don't know, but they're right in the middle of it. Land here. We'll go to meet them at once. Timidity has never been an efficacious tool with us." Well, they were people. And one could only wish that all people were like them. There was a man and a woman, and they were clothed either in very bright garments or in no garments at all, but only in a very bright light. "Talk to them, Father Briton," said Stark. "You are the linguist." "Howdy," said the priest. He may or may not have been understood, but the two of them smiled at him, so he went on. "Father Briton from Philadelphia," he said, "on detached service. And you, my good man, what is your handle, your monicker, your tag?" "Ha-Adamah," said the man. "And your daughter, or niece?" It may be that the shining man frowned momentarily at this; but the woman smiled, proving that she was human. "The woman is named Hawwah," said the man. "The sheep is named sheep, the lion is named lion, the horse is named horse and the hoolock is named hoolock." "I understand. It is possible that this could go on and on. How is it that you use the English tongue?" "I have only one tongue; but it is given to us to be understood by all; by the eagle, by the squirrel, by the ass, by the English." "We happen to be bloody Yankees, but we use a borrowed tongue. You wouldn't have a drink on you for a tubful of thirsty travellers, would you?" "The fountain." "Ah—I see." But the crew all drank of the fountain to be sociable. It was water, but water that excelled, cool and with all its original bubbles like the first water ever made. "What do you make of them?" asked Stark. "Human," said Steiner. "It may even be that they are a little more than human. I don't understand that light that surrounds them. And they seem to be clothed, as it were, in dignity." "And very little else," said Father Briton, "though that light trick does serve a purpose. But I'm not sure they'd pass in Philadelphia." "Talk to them again," said Stark. "You're the linguist." "That isn't necessary here, Captain. Talk to them yourself." "Are there any other people here?" Stark asked the man. "The two of us. Man and woman." "But are there any others?" "How would there be any others? What other kind of people could there be than man and woman?" "But is there more than one man or woman?" "How could there be more than one of anything?" The captain was a little puzzled by this, but he went on doggedly: "Ha-Adamah, what do you think that we are? Are we not people?" "You are not anything till I name you. But I will name you and then you can be. You are named Captain. He is named Priest. He is named Engineer. He is named Flunky." "Thanks a lot," said Steiner. "But are we not people?" persisted Captain Stark. "No. We are the people. There are no people but two. How could there be other people?" "And the damnest thing about it," muttered Langweilig, "is, how are you going to prove him wrong? But it does give you a small feeling." "Can we have something to eat?" asked the Captain. "Pick from the trees," said Ha-Adamah, "and then it may be that you will want to sleep on the grass. Being not of human nature (which does not need sleep or rest), it may be that you require respite. But you are free to enjoy the garden and its fruits." "We will," said Captain Stark. They wandered about the place, but they were uneasy. There were the animals. The lion and lioness were enough to make one cautious, though they offered no harm. The two bears had a puzzling look, as though they wanted either to frolic with you or to mangle you. "If there are only two people here," said Casper Craig, "then it may be that the rest of the world is not dangerous at all. It looked fertile wherever we scanned it, though not so fertile as this central bit. And those rocks would bear examining." "Flecked with gold, and possibly with something else," said Stark. "A very promising site." "And everything grows here," added Steiner. "Those are Earth-fruits and I never saw finer. I've tasted the grapes and plums and pears. The figs and dates are superb, the quince is as flavorsome as a quince can be, the cherries are excellent. And I never did taste such oranges. But I haven't yet tried the—" and he stopped. "If you're thinking what I'm afraid to think," said Gilbert, "then it will be the test at least: whether we're having a pleasant dream or whether this is reality. Go ahead and eat one." "I won't be the first to eat one. You eat." "Ask him first. You ask him." "Ha-Adamah, is it allowed to eat the apples?" "Certainly. Eat. It is the finest fruit in the garden." "Well, the analogy breaks down there," said Stark. "I was almost beginning to believe in the thing. But if it isn't that, then what. Father Briton, you are the linguist, but in Hebrew does not Ha-Adamah and Hawwah mean—?" "Of course they do. You know that as well as I." "I was never a believer. But would it be possible for the exact same proposition to maintain here as on Earth?" "All things are possible." And it was then that Ha-Adamah, the shining man, gave a wild cry: "No, no. Do not approach it. It is not allowed to eat of that one!" It was the pomegranate tree, and he was warning Langweilig away from it. "Once more, Father," said Stark, "you should be the authority; but does not the idea that it was the apple that was forbidden go back only to a medieval painting?" "It does. The name of the fruit is not mentioned in Genesis. In Hebrew exegesis, however, the pomegranate is usually indicated." "I thought so. Question the man further, Father. This is too incredible." "It is a little odd. Adam, old man, how long have you been here?" "Forever less six days is the answer that has been given to me. I never did understand the answer, however." "And have you gotten no older in all that time?" "I do not understand what 'older' is. I am as I have been from the beginning." "And do you think that you will ever die?" "To die I do not understand. I am taught that it is a property of fallen nature to die, and that does not pertain to me or mine." "And are you completely happy here?" "Perfectly happy according to my preternatural state. But I am taught that it might be possible to lose that happiness, and then to seek it vainly through all the ages. I am taught that sickness and ageing and even death could come if this happiness were ever lost. I am taught that on at least one other unfortunate world it has actually been lost." "Do you consider yourself a knowledgeable man?" "Yes, since I am the only man, and knowledge is natural to man. But I am further blessed. I have a preternatural intellect." Then Stark cut in once more: "There must be some one question you could ask him, Father. Some way to settle it. I am becoming nearly convinced." "Yes, there is a question that will settle it. Adam, old man, how about a game of checkers?" "This is hardly the time for clowning," said Stark. "I'm not clowning, Captain. How about it, Adam? I'll give you choice of colors and first move." "No. It would be no contest. I have a preternatural intellect." "Well, I beat a barber who was champion of Germantown. And I beat the champion of Morgan County, Tennessee, which is the hottest checker center on Earth. I've played against, and beaten, machines. But I never played a preternatural mind. Let's just set up the board, Adam, and have a go at it." "No. It would be no contest. I would not like to humble you." They were there for three days. They were delighted with the place. It was a world with everything, and it seemed to have only two inhabitants. They went everywhere except into the big cave. "What is there, Adam?" asked Captain Stark. "The great serpent lives there. I would not disturb him. He has long been cranky because plans he had for us did not materialize. But we are taught that should ever evil come to us, which it cannot if we persevere, it will come by him." They learned no more of the real nature of the sphere in their time there. Yet all but one of them were convinced of the reality when they left. And they talked of it as they took off. "A crowd would laugh if told of it," said Stark, "but not many would laugh if they had actually seen the place, or them. I am not a gullible man, but I am convinced of this: that this is a pristine and pure world and that ours and all the others we have visited are fallen worlds. Here are the prototypes of our first parents before their fall. They are garbed in light and innocence, and they have the happiness that we have been seeking for centuries. It would be a crime if anyone disturbed that happiness." "I too am convinced," said Steiner. "It is Paradise itself, where the lion lies down with the lamb, and where the serpent has not prevailed. It would be the darkest of crimes if we or others should play the part of the serpent, and intrude and spoil." "I am probably the most skeptical man in the world," said Casper Craig the tycoon, "but I do believe my eyes. I have been there and seen it. It is indeed an unspoiled Paradise; and it would be a crime calling to the wide heavens for vengeance for anyone to smirch in any way that perfection. "So much for that. Now to business. Gilbert, take a gram: Ninety Million Square Miles of Pristine Paradise for Sale or Lease. Farming, Ranching, exceptional opportunities for Horticulture. Gold, Silver, Iron, Earth-Type Fauna. Terms. Special Rates for Large Settlement Parties. Write, Gram, or call in person at any of our planetary offices as listed below. Ask for Brochure—Eden Acres Unlimited." Down in the great cave that Old Serpent, a two-legged one among whose names were "Snake-Oil Sam," spoke to his underlings: "It'll take them fourteen days to get back with the settlers. We'll have time to overhaul the blasters. We haven't had any well-equipped settlers for six weeks. It used to be we'd hardly have time to strip and slaughter and stow before there was another batch to take care of." "I think you'd better write me some new lines," said Adam. "I feel like a goof saying those same ones to each bunch." "You are a goof, and therefore perfect for the part. I was in show business long enough to know never to change a line too soon. I did change Adam and Eve to Ha-Adamah and Hawwah, and the apple to the pomegranate. People aren't becoming any smarter—but they are becoming better researched, and they insist on authenticity. "This is still a perfect come-on here. There is something in human nature that cannot resist the idea of a Perfect Paradise. Folks will whoop and holler to their neighbors to come in droves to spoil and mar it. It isn't greed or the desire for new land so much—though that is strong too. Mainly it is the feverish passion to befoul and poison what is unspoiled. Fortunately I am sagacious enough to take advantage of this trait. And when you start to farm a new world on a shoestring you have to acquire your equipment as you can." He looked proudly around at the great cave with its mountains and tiers of materials, heavy machinery of all sorts, titanic crates of foodstuff space-sealed; wheeled, tracked, propped, vaned and jetted vehicles; and power packs to run a world. He looked at the three dozen space ships stripped and stacked, and at the rather large pile of bone-meal in one corner. "We will have to have another lion," said Eve. "Bowser is getting old, and Marie-Yvette abuses him and gnaws his toes. And we do have to have a big-maned lion to lie down with the lamb." "I know it, Eve. The lion is a very important prop. Maybe one of the crackpot settlers will bring a new lion." "And can't you mix another kind of shining paint? This itches. It's hell." "I'm working on it." Casper Craig was still dictating the gram: "Amazing quality of longevity seemingly inherent in the locale. Climate ideal. Daylight or half-light. All twenty-one hours from Planet Delphina and from Sol. Pure water for all industrial purposes. Scenic and storied. Zoning and pre-settlement restrictions to insure congenial neighbors. A completely planned globular settlement in a near arm of our own galaxy. Low taxes and liberal credit. Financing our specialty—" "And you had better have an armed escort when you return," said Father Briton. "Why in cosmos would we want an armed escort?" "It's as phony as a seven-credit note!" "You, a man of the cloth doubt it? And us ready skeptics convinced by our senses? Why do you doubt?" "It is only the unbelieving who believe so easily in obvious frauds. Theologically unsound, dramaturgically weak, philologically impossible, zoologically rigged, salted conspicuously with gold and shot through with anachronisms. And moreover he was afraid to play me at checkers." "What?" "If I have a preternatural intellect I wouldn't be afraid of a game of checkers with anyone. Yet there was an unusual mind there somewhere; it was just that he chose not to make our acquaintance personally." "They looked at the priest thoughtfully. "But it was Paradise in one way," said Steiner at last. "How?" "All the time we were there the woman did not speak."

How do religion and religious faith contribute to the story?

6

The story of Adam and Eve (or Genesis) is one of the most widely known myths. The idea that we, as humans, once inhabited Paradise, but lost it due to our greed and stolen innocence is intoxicating. It explains why life isn’t perfect, why things don’t always go our way, and why people die. In In the Garden, this story is explored in a different manner. The Christian origin story acts as a backdrop for this uninhabited planet that a crew visits. After exploring, they are quick to believe that they have discovered another universe’s Eden. And, therefore, quick to destroy it. Their religious faith and belief in the story of Adam and Eve adds to the gravity of the situation. If this weren’t a well-known story, then the crew would have been less amazed by the space before them. The perfection of the place, and the potential of Paradise, was what truly brought them in and, eventually, destroyed them.

61007

IT WAS A DULL, ROUTINE LITTLE WORLD. IT DIDN'T EVEN HAVE A CITY. EVERYTHING IT HAD WAS IN THE GARDEN BY R. A. LAFFERTY [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, March 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] The protozoic recorder chirped like a bird. Not only would there be life traces on that little moon, but it would be a lively place. So they skipped several steps in the procedure. The chordata discerner read Positive over most of the surface. There was spinal fluid on that orb, rivers of it. So again they omitted several tests and went to the cognition scanner. Would it show Thought on the body? Naturally they did not get results at once, nor did they expect to; it required a fine adjustment. But they were disappointed that they found nothing for several hours as they hovered high over the rotation. Then it came—clearly and definitely, but from quite a small location only. "Limited," said Steiner, "as though within a pale. As though there were but one city, if that is its form. Shall we follow the rest of the surface to find another, or concentrate on this? It'll be twelve hours before it's back in our ken if we let it go now." "Let's lock on this one and finish the scan. Then we can do the rest of the world to make sure we've missed nothing," said Stark. There was one more test to run, one very tricky and difficult of analysis, that with the Extraordinary Perception Locator. This was designed simply to locate a source of superior thought. But this might be so varied or so unfamiliar that often both the machine and the designer of it were puzzled as to how to read the results. The E. P. Locator had been designed by Glaser. But when the Locator had refused to read Positive when turned on the inventor himself, bad blood developed between machine and man. Glaser knew that he had extraordinary perception. He was a much honored man in his field. He told the machine so heatedly. The machine replied, with such warmth that its relays chattered, that Glaser did not have extraordinary perception; he had only ordinary perception to an extraordinary degree. There is a difference , the machine insisted. It was for this reason that Glaser used that model no more, but built others more amenable. And it was for this reason also that the owners of Little Probe had acquired the original machine so cheaply. And there was no denying that the Extraordinary Perception Locator (or Eppel) was a contrary machine. On Earth it had read Positive on a number of crack-pots, including Waxey Sax, a jazz tootler who could not even read music. But it had also read Positive on ninety per cent of the acknowledged superior minds of the Earth. In space it had been a sound guide to the unusual intelligences encountered. Yet on Suzuki-Mi it had read Positive on a two-inch-long worm, only one of them out of billions. For the countless identical worms no trace of anything at all was shown by the test. So it was with mixed expectations that Steiner locked onto the area and got a flick. He then narrowed to a smaller area (apparently one individual, though this could not be certain) and got very definite action. Eppel was busy. The machine had a touch of the ham in it, and assumed an air of importance when it ran these tests. Finally it signaled the result, the most exasperating result it ever produces: the single orange light. It was the equivalent of the shrug of the shoulders in a man. They called it the "You tell me light." So among the intelligences there was at least one that might be extraordinary, though possibly in a crackpot way. It is good to be forewarned. "Scan the remainder of the world, Steiner," said Stark, "and the rest of us will get some sleep. If you find no other spot then we will go down on that one the next time it is in position under us, in about twelve hours." "You don't want to visit any of the other areas first? Somewhere away from the thoughtful creature?" "No. The rest of the world may be dangerous. There must be a reason that thought is in one spot only. If we find no others then we will go down boldly and visit this." So they all, except Steiner, went off to their bunks then: Stark, the Captain; Gregory Gilbert, the executive officer; Wolfgang Langweilig, the engineer; Casper Craig, super-cargo, tycoon and 51% owner of the Little Probe, and F. R. Briton, S.J., a Jesuit priest who was linguist and checker champion of the craft. Dawn did not come to the moon-town. The Little Probe hovered stationary in the light and the moon-town came up under the dawn. Then the Probe went down to visit whatever was there. "There's no town," said Steiner. "Not a building. Yet we're on the track of the minds. There's nothing but a meadow and some boscage, a sort of fountain or pool, and four streams coming out of it." "Keep on towards the minds," said Stark. "They're our target." "Not a building, not two sticks or stones placed together. That looks like an Earth-type sheep there. And that looks like an Earth-lion, I'm almost afraid to say. And those two ... why, they could well be Earth-people. But with a difference. Where is that bright light coming from?" "I don't know, but they're right in the middle of it. Land here. We'll go to meet them at once. Timidity has never been an efficacious tool with us." Well, they were people. And one could only wish that all people were like them. There was a man and a woman, and they were clothed either in very bright garments or in no garments at all, but only in a very bright light. "Talk to them, Father Briton," said Stark. "You are the linguist." "Howdy," said the priest. He may or may not have been understood, but the two of them smiled at him, so he went on. "Father Briton from Philadelphia," he said, "on detached service. And you, my good man, what is your handle, your monicker, your tag?" "Ha-Adamah," said the man. "And your daughter, or niece?" It may be that the shining man frowned momentarily at this; but the woman smiled, proving that she was human. "The woman is named Hawwah," said the man. "The sheep is named sheep, the lion is named lion, the horse is named horse and the hoolock is named hoolock." "I understand. It is possible that this could go on and on. How is it that you use the English tongue?" "I have only one tongue; but it is given to us to be understood by all; by the eagle, by the squirrel, by the ass, by the English." "We happen to be bloody Yankees, but we use a borrowed tongue. You wouldn't have a drink on you for a tubful of thirsty travellers, would you?" "The fountain." "Ah—I see." But the crew all drank of the fountain to be sociable. It was water, but water that excelled, cool and with all its original bubbles like the first water ever made. "What do you make of them?" asked Stark. "Human," said Steiner. "It may even be that they are a little more than human. I don't understand that light that surrounds them. And they seem to be clothed, as it were, in dignity." "And very little else," said Father Briton, "though that light trick does serve a purpose. But I'm not sure they'd pass in Philadelphia." "Talk to them again," said Stark. "You're the linguist." "That isn't necessary here, Captain. Talk to them yourself." "Are there any other people here?" Stark asked the man. "The two of us. Man and woman." "But are there any others?" "How would there be any others? What other kind of people could there be than man and woman?" "But is there more than one man or woman?" "How could there be more than one of anything?" The captain was a little puzzled by this, but he went on doggedly: "Ha-Adamah, what do you think that we are? Are we not people?" "You are not anything till I name you. But I will name you and then you can be. You are named Captain. He is named Priest. He is named Engineer. He is named Flunky." "Thanks a lot," said Steiner. "But are we not people?" persisted Captain Stark. "No. We are the people. There are no people but two. How could there be other people?" "And the damnest thing about it," muttered Langweilig, "is, how are you going to prove him wrong? But it does give you a small feeling." "Can we have something to eat?" asked the Captain. "Pick from the trees," said Ha-Adamah, "and then it may be that you will want to sleep on the grass. Being not of human nature (which does not need sleep or rest), it may be that you require respite. But you are free to enjoy the garden and its fruits." "We will," said Captain Stark. They wandered about the place, but they were uneasy. There were the animals. The lion and lioness were enough to make one cautious, though they offered no harm. The two bears had a puzzling look, as though they wanted either to frolic with you or to mangle you. "If there are only two people here," said Casper Craig, "then it may be that the rest of the world is not dangerous at all. It looked fertile wherever we scanned it, though not so fertile as this central bit. And those rocks would bear examining." "Flecked with gold, and possibly with something else," said Stark. "A very promising site." "And everything grows here," added Steiner. "Those are Earth-fruits and I never saw finer. I've tasted the grapes and plums and pears. The figs and dates are superb, the quince is as flavorsome as a quince can be, the cherries are excellent. And I never did taste such oranges. But I haven't yet tried the—" and he stopped. "If you're thinking what I'm afraid to think," said Gilbert, "then it will be the test at least: whether we're having a pleasant dream or whether this is reality. Go ahead and eat one." "I won't be the first to eat one. You eat." "Ask him first. You ask him." "Ha-Adamah, is it allowed to eat the apples?" "Certainly. Eat. It is the finest fruit in the garden." "Well, the analogy breaks down there," said Stark. "I was almost beginning to believe in the thing. But if it isn't that, then what. Father Briton, you are the linguist, but in Hebrew does not Ha-Adamah and Hawwah mean—?" "Of course they do. You know that as well as I." "I was never a believer. But would it be possible for the exact same proposition to maintain here as on Earth?" "All things are possible." And it was then that Ha-Adamah, the shining man, gave a wild cry: "No, no. Do not approach it. It is not allowed to eat of that one!" It was the pomegranate tree, and he was warning Langweilig away from it. "Once more, Father," said Stark, "you should be the authority; but does not the idea that it was the apple that was forbidden go back only to a medieval painting?" "It does. The name of the fruit is not mentioned in Genesis. In Hebrew exegesis, however, the pomegranate is usually indicated." "I thought so. Question the man further, Father. This is too incredible." "It is a little odd. Adam, old man, how long have you been here?" "Forever less six days is the answer that has been given to me. I never did understand the answer, however." "And have you gotten no older in all that time?" "I do not understand what 'older' is. I am as I have been from the beginning." "And do you think that you will ever die?" "To die I do not understand. I am taught that it is a property of fallen nature to die, and that does not pertain to me or mine." "And are you completely happy here?" "Perfectly happy according to my preternatural state. But I am taught that it might be possible to lose that happiness, and then to seek it vainly through all the ages. I am taught that sickness and ageing and even death could come if this happiness were ever lost. I am taught that on at least one other unfortunate world it has actually been lost." "Do you consider yourself a knowledgeable man?" "Yes, since I am the only man, and knowledge is natural to man. But I am further blessed. I have a preternatural intellect." Then Stark cut in once more: "There must be some one question you could ask him, Father. Some way to settle it. I am becoming nearly convinced." "Yes, there is a question that will settle it. Adam, old man, how about a game of checkers?" "This is hardly the time for clowning," said Stark. "I'm not clowning, Captain. How about it, Adam? I'll give you choice of colors and first move." "No. It would be no contest. I have a preternatural intellect." "Well, I beat a barber who was champion of Germantown. And I beat the champion of Morgan County, Tennessee, which is the hottest checker center on Earth. I've played against, and beaten, machines. But I never played a preternatural mind. Let's just set up the board, Adam, and have a go at it." "No. It would be no contest. I would not like to humble you." They were there for three days. They were delighted with the place. It was a world with everything, and it seemed to have only two inhabitants. They went everywhere except into the big cave. "What is there, Adam?" asked Captain Stark. "The great serpent lives there. I would not disturb him. He has long been cranky because plans he had for us did not materialize. But we are taught that should ever evil come to us, which it cannot if we persevere, it will come by him." They learned no more of the real nature of the sphere in their time there. Yet all but one of them were convinced of the reality when they left. And they talked of it as they took off. "A crowd would laugh if told of it," said Stark, "but not many would laugh if they had actually seen the place, or them. I am not a gullible man, but I am convinced of this: that this is a pristine and pure world and that ours and all the others we have visited are fallen worlds. Here are the prototypes of our first parents before their fall. They are garbed in light and innocence, and they have the happiness that we have been seeking for centuries. It would be a crime if anyone disturbed that happiness." "I too am convinced," said Steiner. "It is Paradise itself, where the lion lies down with the lamb, and where the serpent has not prevailed. It would be the darkest of crimes if we or others should play the part of the serpent, and intrude and spoil." "I am probably the most skeptical man in the world," said Casper Craig the tycoon, "but I do believe my eyes. I have been there and seen it. It is indeed an unspoiled Paradise; and it would be a crime calling to the wide heavens for vengeance for anyone to smirch in any way that perfection. "So much for that. Now to business. Gilbert, take a gram: Ninety Million Square Miles of Pristine Paradise for Sale or Lease. Farming, Ranching, exceptional opportunities for Horticulture. Gold, Silver, Iron, Earth-Type Fauna. Terms. Special Rates for Large Settlement Parties. Write, Gram, or call in person at any of our planetary offices as listed below. Ask for Brochure—Eden Acres Unlimited." Down in the great cave that Old Serpent, a two-legged one among whose names were "Snake-Oil Sam," spoke to his underlings: "It'll take them fourteen days to get back with the settlers. We'll have time to overhaul the blasters. We haven't had any well-equipped settlers for six weeks. It used to be we'd hardly have time to strip and slaughter and stow before there was another batch to take care of." "I think you'd better write me some new lines," said Adam. "I feel like a goof saying those same ones to each bunch." "You are a goof, and therefore perfect for the part. I was in show business long enough to know never to change a line too soon. I did change Adam and Eve to Ha-Adamah and Hawwah, and the apple to the pomegranate. People aren't becoming any smarter—but they are becoming better researched, and they insist on authenticity. "This is still a perfect come-on here. There is something in human nature that cannot resist the idea of a Perfect Paradise. Folks will whoop and holler to their neighbors to come in droves to spoil and mar it. It isn't greed or the desire for new land so much—though that is strong too. Mainly it is the feverish passion to befoul and poison what is unspoiled. Fortunately I am sagacious enough to take advantage of this trait. And when you start to farm a new world on a shoestring you have to acquire your equipment as you can." He looked proudly around at the great cave with its mountains and tiers of materials, heavy machinery of all sorts, titanic crates of foodstuff space-sealed; wheeled, tracked, propped, vaned and jetted vehicles; and power packs to run a world. He looked at the three dozen space ships stripped and stacked, and at the rather large pile of bone-meal in one corner. "We will have to have another lion," said Eve. "Bowser is getting old, and Marie-Yvette abuses him and gnaws his toes. And we do have to have a big-maned lion to lie down with the lamb." "I know it, Eve. The lion is a very important prop. Maybe one of the crackpot settlers will bring a new lion." "And can't you mix another kind of shining paint? This itches. It's hell." "I'm working on it." Casper Craig was still dictating the gram: "Amazing quality of longevity seemingly inherent in the locale. Climate ideal. Daylight or half-light. All twenty-one hours from Planet Delphina and from Sol. Pure water for all industrial purposes. Scenic and storied. Zoning and pre-settlement restrictions to insure congenial neighbors. A completely planned globular settlement in a near arm of our own galaxy. Low taxes and liberal credit. Financing our specialty—" "And you had better have an armed escort when you return," said Father Briton. "Why in cosmos would we want an armed escort?" "It's as phony as a seven-credit note!" "You, a man of the cloth doubt it? And us ready skeptics convinced by our senses? Why do you doubt?" "It is only the unbelieving who believe so easily in obvious frauds. Theologically unsound, dramaturgically weak, philologically impossible, zoologically rigged, salted conspicuously with gold and shot through with anachronisms. And moreover he was afraid to play me at checkers." "What?" "If I have a preternatural intellect I wouldn't be afraid of a game of checkers with anyone. Yet there was an unusual mind there somewhere; it was just that he chose not to make our acquaintance personally." "They looked at the priest thoughtfully. "But it was Paradise in one way," said Steiner at last. "How?" "All the time we were there the woman did not speak."

How is human fallenness explored as a theme?

5

Human sinfulness and its collective fall from grace are referenced in several ways in the story. Ha-Adamah contrasts his world’s perfection with the fallenness that is apparent in the visitors. He claims to be free from the stain of original sin. He presents himself as perfectly happy and not subject to corruption, aging, or death. This is contrasted with Earth's humanity which was fated to “lose that happiness, and then to seek it vainly through all the ages.” The entire crew of the Little Probe agree on the unacceptability of spoiling a pristine world. Even so, they irresistibly and almost gleefully prepare to exploit the world’s riches. Snake-Oil Sam expounds upon this inclination. He claims that on top of the very real greed of the visitors they’ve deceived over the years, they are capitalizing on the human desire to despoil the unspoiled. This is a clear summation of concupiscence—the inclination for fallen humanity to tend toward sin. It is clear that Sam and his associates are just as fallen as the other individuals in the story, preying on others to further their own goals.

61007

IT WAS A DULL, ROUTINE LITTLE WORLD. IT DIDN'T EVEN HAVE A CITY. EVERYTHING IT HAD WAS IN THE GARDEN BY R. A. LAFFERTY [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, March 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] The protozoic recorder chirped like a bird. Not only would there be life traces on that little moon, but it would be a lively place. So they skipped several steps in the procedure. The chordata discerner read Positive over most of the surface. There was spinal fluid on that orb, rivers of it. So again they omitted several tests and went to the cognition scanner. Would it show Thought on the body? Naturally they did not get results at once, nor did they expect to; it required a fine adjustment. But they were disappointed that they found nothing for several hours as they hovered high over the rotation. Then it came—clearly and definitely, but from quite a small location only. "Limited," said Steiner, "as though within a pale. As though there were but one city, if that is its form. Shall we follow the rest of the surface to find another, or concentrate on this? It'll be twelve hours before it's back in our ken if we let it go now." "Let's lock on this one and finish the scan. Then we can do the rest of the world to make sure we've missed nothing," said Stark. There was one more test to run, one very tricky and difficult of analysis, that with the Extraordinary Perception Locator. This was designed simply to locate a source of superior thought. But this might be so varied or so unfamiliar that often both the machine and the designer of it were puzzled as to how to read the results. The E. P. Locator had been designed by Glaser. But when the Locator had refused to read Positive when turned on the inventor himself, bad blood developed between machine and man. Glaser knew that he had extraordinary perception. He was a much honored man in his field. He told the machine so heatedly. The machine replied, with such warmth that its relays chattered, that Glaser did not have extraordinary perception; he had only ordinary perception to an extraordinary degree. There is a difference , the machine insisted. It was for this reason that Glaser used that model no more, but built others more amenable. And it was for this reason also that the owners of Little Probe had acquired the original machine so cheaply. And there was no denying that the Extraordinary Perception Locator (or Eppel) was a contrary machine. On Earth it had read Positive on a number of crack-pots, including Waxey Sax, a jazz tootler who could not even read music. But it had also read Positive on ninety per cent of the acknowledged superior minds of the Earth. In space it had been a sound guide to the unusual intelligences encountered. Yet on Suzuki-Mi it had read Positive on a two-inch-long worm, only one of them out of billions. For the countless identical worms no trace of anything at all was shown by the test. So it was with mixed expectations that Steiner locked onto the area and got a flick. He then narrowed to a smaller area (apparently one individual, though this could not be certain) and got very definite action. Eppel was busy. The machine had a touch of the ham in it, and assumed an air of importance when it ran these tests. Finally it signaled the result, the most exasperating result it ever produces: the single orange light. It was the equivalent of the shrug of the shoulders in a man. They called it the "You tell me light." So among the intelligences there was at least one that might be extraordinary, though possibly in a crackpot way. It is good to be forewarned. "Scan the remainder of the world, Steiner," said Stark, "and the rest of us will get some sleep. If you find no other spot then we will go down on that one the next time it is in position under us, in about twelve hours." "You don't want to visit any of the other areas first? Somewhere away from the thoughtful creature?" "No. The rest of the world may be dangerous. There must be a reason that thought is in one spot only. If we find no others then we will go down boldly and visit this." So they all, except Steiner, went off to their bunks then: Stark, the Captain; Gregory Gilbert, the executive officer; Wolfgang Langweilig, the engineer; Casper Craig, super-cargo, tycoon and 51% owner of the Little Probe, and F. R. Briton, S.J., a Jesuit priest who was linguist and checker champion of the craft. Dawn did not come to the moon-town. The Little Probe hovered stationary in the light and the moon-town came up under the dawn. Then the Probe went down to visit whatever was there. "There's no town," said Steiner. "Not a building. Yet we're on the track of the minds. There's nothing but a meadow and some boscage, a sort of fountain or pool, and four streams coming out of it." "Keep on towards the minds," said Stark. "They're our target." "Not a building, not two sticks or stones placed together. That looks like an Earth-type sheep there. And that looks like an Earth-lion, I'm almost afraid to say. And those two ... why, they could well be Earth-people. But with a difference. Where is that bright light coming from?" "I don't know, but they're right in the middle of it. Land here. We'll go to meet them at once. Timidity has never been an efficacious tool with us." Well, they were people. And one could only wish that all people were like them. There was a man and a woman, and they were clothed either in very bright garments or in no garments at all, but only in a very bright light. "Talk to them, Father Briton," said Stark. "You are the linguist." "Howdy," said the priest. He may or may not have been understood, but the two of them smiled at him, so he went on. "Father Briton from Philadelphia," he said, "on detached service. And you, my good man, what is your handle, your monicker, your tag?" "Ha-Adamah," said the man. "And your daughter, or niece?" It may be that the shining man frowned momentarily at this; but the woman smiled, proving that she was human. "The woman is named Hawwah," said the man. "The sheep is named sheep, the lion is named lion, the horse is named horse and the hoolock is named hoolock." "I understand. It is possible that this could go on and on. How is it that you use the English tongue?" "I have only one tongue; but it is given to us to be understood by all; by the eagle, by the squirrel, by the ass, by the English." "We happen to be bloody Yankees, but we use a borrowed tongue. You wouldn't have a drink on you for a tubful of thirsty travellers, would you?" "The fountain." "Ah—I see." But the crew all drank of the fountain to be sociable. It was water, but water that excelled, cool and with all its original bubbles like the first water ever made. "What do you make of them?" asked Stark. "Human," said Steiner. "It may even be that they are a little more than human. I don't understand that light that surrounds them. And they seem to be clothed, as it were, in dignity." "And very little else," said Father Briton, "though that light trick does serve a purpose. But I'm not sure they'd pass in Philadelphia." "Talk to them again," said Stark. "You're the linguist." "That isn't necessary here, Captain. Talk to them yourself." "Are there any other people here?" Stark asked the man. "The two of us. Man and woman." "But are there any others?" "How would there be any others? What other kind of people could there be than man and woman?" "But is there more than one man or woman?" "How could there be more than one of anything?" The captain was a little puzzled by this, but he went on doggedly: "Ha-Adamah, what do you think that we are? Are we not people?" "You are not anything till I name you. But I will name you and then you can be. You are named Captain. He is named Priest. He is named Engineer. He is named Flunky." "Thanks a lot," said Steiner. "But are we not people?" persisted Captain Stark. "No. We are the people. There are no people but two. How could there be other people?" "And the damnest thing about it," muttered Langweilig, "is, how are you going to prove him wrong? But it does give you a small feeling." "Can we have something to eat?" asked the Captain. "Pick from the trees," said Ha-Adamah, "and then it may be that you will want to sleep on the grass. Being not of human nature (which does not need sleep or rest), it may be that you require respite. But you are free to enjoy the garden and its fruits." "We will," said Captain Stark. They wandered about the place, but they were uneasy. There were the animals. The lion and lioness were enough to make one cautious, though they offered no harm. The two bears had a puzzling look, as though they wanted either to frolic with you or to mangle you. "If there are only two people here," said Casper Craig, "then it may be that the rest of the world is not dangerous at all. It looked fertile wherever we scanned it, though not so fertile as this central bit. And those rocks would bear examining." "Flecked with gold, and possibly with something else," said Stark. "A very promising site." "And everything grows here," added Steiner. "Those are Earth-fruits and I never saw finer. I've tasted the grapes and plums and pears. The figs and dates are superb, the quince is as flavorsome as a quince can be, the cherries are excellent. And I never did taste such oranges. But I haven't yet tried the—" and he stopped. "If you're thinking what I'm afraid to think," said Gilbert, "then it will be the test at least: whether we're having a pleasant dream or whether this is reality. Go ahead and eat one." "I won't be the first to eat one. You eat." "Ask him first. You ask him." "Ha-Adamah, is it allowed to eat the apples?" "Certainly. Eat. It is the finest fruit in the garden." "Well, the analogy breaks down there," said Stark. "I was almost beginning to believe in the thing. But if it isn't that, then what. Father Briton, you are the linguist, but in Hebrew does not Ha-Adamah and Hawwah mean—?" "Of course they do. You know that as well as I." "I was never a believer. But would it be possible for the exact same proposition to maintain here as on Earth?" "All things are possible." And it was then that Ha-Adamah, the shining man, gave a wild cry: "No, no. Do not approach it. It is not allowed to eat of that one!" It was the pomegranate tree, and he was warning Langweilig away from it. "Once more, Father," said Stark, "you should be the authority; but does not the idea that it was the apple that was forbidden go back only to a medieval painting?" "It does. The name of the fruit is not mentioned in Genesis. In Hebrew exegesis, however, the pomegranate is usually indicated." "I thought so. Question the man further, Father. This is too incredible." "It is a little odd. Adam, old man, how long have you been here?" "Forever less six days is the answer that has been given to me. I never did understand the answer, however." "And have you gotten no older in all that time?" "I do not understand what 'older' is. I am as I have been from the beginning." "And do you think that you will ever die?" "To die I do not understand. I am taught that it is a property of fallen nature to die, and that does not pertain to me or mine." "And are you completely happy here?" "Perfectly happy according to my preternatural state. But I am taught that it might be possible to lose that happiness, and then to seek it vainly through all the ages. I am taught that sickness and ageing and even death could come if this happiness were ever lost. I am taught that on at least one other unfortunate world it has actually been lost." "Do you consider yourself a knowledgeable man?" "Yes, since I am the only man, and knowledge is natural to man. But I am further blessed. I have a preternatural intellect." Then Stark cut in once more: "There must be some one question you could ask him, Father. Some way to settle it. I am becoming nearly convinced." "Yes, there is a question that will settle it. Adam, old man, how about a game of checkers?" "This is hardly the time for clowning," said Stark. "I'm not clowning, Captain. How about it, Adam? I'll give you choice of colors and first move." "No. It would be no contest. I have a preternatural intellect." "Well, I beat a barber who was champion of Germantown. And I beat the champion of Morgan County, Tennessee, which is the hottest checker center on Earth. I've played against, and beaten, machines. But I never played a preternatural mind. Let's just set up the board, Adam, and have a go at it." "No. It would be no contest. I would not like to humble you." They were there for three days. They were delighted with the place. It was a world with everything, and it seemed to have only two inhabitants. They went everywhere except into the big cave. "What is there, Adam?" asked Captain Stark. "The great serpent lives there. I would not disturb him. He has long been cranky because plans he had for us did not materialize. But we are taught that should ever evil come to us, which it cannot if we persevere, it will come by him." They learned no more of the real nature of the sphere in their time there. Yet all but one of them were convinced of the reality when they left. And they talked of it as they took off. "A crowd would laugh if told of it," said Stark, "but not many would laugh if they had actually seen the place, or them. I am not a gullible man, but I am convinced of this: that this is a pristine and pure world and that ours and all the others we have visited are fallen worlds. Here are the prototypes of our first parents before their fall. They are garbed in light and innocence, and they have the happiness that we have been seeking for centuries. It would be a crime if anyone disturbed that happiness." "I too am convinced," said Steiner. "It is Paradise itself, where the lion lies down with the lamb, and where the serpent has not prevailed. It would be the darkest of crimes if we or others should play the part of the serpent, and intrude and spoil." "I am probably the most skeptical man in the world," said Casper Craig the tycoon, "but I do believe my eyes. I have been there and seen it. It is indeed an unspoiled Paradise; and it would be a crime calling to the wide heavens for vengeance for anyone to smirch in any way that perfection. "So much for that. Now to business. Gilbert, take a gram: Ninety Million Square Miles of Pristine Paradise for Sale or Lease. Farming, Ranching, exceptional opportunities for Horticulture. Gold, Silver, Iron, Earth-Type Fauna. Terms. Special Rates for Large Settlement Parties. Write, Gram, or call in person at any of our planetary offices as listed below. Ask for Brochure—Eden Acres Unlimited." Down in the great cave that Old Serpent, a two-legged one among whose names were "Snake-Oil Sam," spoke to his underlings: "It'll take them fourteen days to get back with the settlers. We'll have time to overhaul the blasters. We haven't had any well-equipped settlers for six weeks. It used to be we'd hardly have time to strip and slaughter and stow before there was another batch to take care of." "I think you'd better write me some new lines," said Adam. "I feel like a goof saying those same ones to each bunch." "You are a goof, and therefore perfect for the part. I was in show business long enough to know never to change a line too soon. I did change Adam and Eve to Ha-Adamah and Hawwah, and the apple to the pomegranate. People aren't becoming any smarter—but they are becoming better researched, and they insist on authenticity. "This is still a perfect come-on here. There is something in human nature that cannot resist the idea of a Perfect Paradise. Folks will whoop and holler to their neighbors to come in droves to spoil and mar it. It isn't greed or the desire for new land so much—though that is strong too. Mainly it is the feverish passion to befoul and poison what is unspoiled. Fortunately I am sagacious enough to take advantage of this trait. And when you start to farm a new world on a shoestring you have to acquire your equipment as you can." He looked proudly around at the great cave with its mountains and tiers of materials, heavy machinery of all sorts, titanic crates of foodstuff space-sealed; wheeled, tracked, propped, vaned and jetted vehicles; and power packs to run a world. He looked at the three dozen space ships stripped and stacked, and at the rather large pile of bone-meal in one corner. "We will have to have another lion," said Eve. "Bowser is getting old, and Marie-Yvette abuses him and gnaws his toes. And we do have to have a big-maned lion to lie down with the lamb." "I know it, Eve. The lion is a very important prop. Maybe one of the crackpot settlers will bring a new lion." "And can't you mix another kind of shining paint? This itches. It's hell." "I'm working on it." Casper Craig was still dictating the gram: "Amazing quality of longevity seemingly inherent in the locale. Climate ideal. Daylight or half-light. All twenty-one hours from Planet Delphina and from Sol. Pure water for all industrial purposes. Scenic and storied. Zoning and pre-settlement restrictions to insure congenial neighbors. A completely planned globular settlement in a near arm of our own galaxy. Low taxes and liberal credit. Financing our specialty—" "And you had better have an armed escort when you return," said Father Briton. "Why in cosmos would we want an armed escort?" "It's as phony as a seven-credit note!" "You, a man of the cloth doubt it? And us ready skeptics convinced by our senses? Why do you doubt?" "It is only the unbelieving who believe so easily in obvious frauds. Theologically unsound, dramaturgically weak, philologically impossible, zoologically rigged, salted conspicuously with gold and shot through with anachronisms. And moreover he was afraid to play me at checkers." "What?" "If I have a preternatural intellect I wouldn't be afraid of a game of checkers with anyone. Yet there was an unusual mind there somewhere; it was just that he chose not to make our acquaintance personally." "They looked at the priest thoughtfully. "But it was Paradise in one way," said Steiner at last. "How?" "All the time we were there the woman did not speak."

How is human fallenness explored as a theme?

1

Although the visiting crew members are impressed and in awe of the Garden of Eden, they have every intention of pillaging the place. They love the clean and delicious water it offers and the tasty fruit that is better than anything they’ve had before. Yet, they cannot resist their urge to take over the land and commercialize it. They do not care that their actions will ruin the purity of the land and its two occupants. They are greedy and only want what will benefit them in the end. Likewise, Snake-Oil Sam recognizes the immense beauty of the untouched world, and instead of trying to preserve it, he entices groups of people to come and try to take it over so that he can murder them and take their goods and equipment. Snake-Oil Sam is cunning because he innately knows that if he can convince settlers that this world is pure and special, they will immediately desire to destroy it. According to Sam, people can’t resist ruining something that appears to be unique and unadulterated. He uses human nature and the desire to control to his own advantage. By convincing strangers that Adam and Eve are simple and kind and unaware of ageing or suffering, he knows that those strangers will return to the land to make sure that Adam and Eve learn all about those topics. They can’t help themselves precisely because humans have already fallen and are predisposed to sinning.

61007

IT WAS A DULL, ROUTINE LITTLE WORLD. IT DIDN'T EVEN HAVE A CITY. EVERYTHING IT HAD WAS IN THE GARDEN BY R. A. LAFFERTY [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, March 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] The protozoic recorder chirped like a bird. Not only would there be life traces on that little moon, but it would be a lively place. So they skipped several steps in the procedure. The chordata discerner read Positive over most of the surface. There was spinal fluid on that orb, rivers of it. So again they omitted several tests and went to the cognition scanner. Would it show Thought on the body? Naturally they did not get results at once, nor did they expect to; it required a fine adjustment. But they were disappointed that they found nothing for several hours as they hovered high over the rotation. Then it came—clearly and definitely, but from quite a small location only. "Limited," said Steiner, "as though within a pale. As though there were but one city, if that is its form. Shall we follow the rest of the surface to find another, or concentrate on this? It'll be twelve hours before it's back in our ken if we let it go now." "Let's lock on this one and finish the scan. Then we can do the rest of the world to make sure we've missed nothing," said Stark. There was one more test to run, one very tricky and difficult of analysis, that with the Extraordinary Perception Locator. This was designed simply to locate a source of superior thought. But this might be so varied or so unfamiliar that often both the machine and the designer of it were puzzled as to how to read the results. The E. P. Locator had been designed by Glaser. But when the Locator had refused to read Positive when turned on the inventor himself, bad blood developed between machine and man. Glaser knew that he had extraordinary perception. He was a much honored man in his field. He told the machine so heatedly. The machine replied, with such warmth that its relays chattered, that Glaser did not have extraordinary perception; he had only ordinary perception to an extraordinary degree. There is a difference , the machine insisted. It was for this reason that Glaser used that model no more, but built others more amenable. And it was for this reason also that the owners of Little Probe had acquired the original machine so cheaply. And there was no denying that the Extraordinary Perception Locator (or Eppel) was a contrary machine. On Earth it had read Positive on a number of crack-pots, including Waxey Sax, a jazz tootler who could not even read music. But it had also read Positive on ninety per cent of the acknowledged superior minds of the Earth. In space it had been a sound guide to the unusual intelligences encountered. Yet on Suzuki-Mi it had read Positive on a two-inch-long worm, only one of them out of billions. For the countless identical worms no trace of anything at all was shown by the test. So it was with mixed expectations that Steiner locked onto the area and got a flick. He then narrowed to a smaller area (apparently one individual, though this could not be certain) and got very definite action. Eppel was busy. The machine had a touch of the ham in it, and assumed an air of importance when it ran these tests. Finally it signaled the result, the most exasperating result it ever produces: the single orange light. It was the equivalent of the shrug of the shoulders in a man. They called it the "You tell me light." So among the intelligences there was at least one that might be extraordinary, though possibly in a crackpot way. It is good to be forewarned. "Scan the remainder of the world, Steiner," said Stark, "and the rest of us will get some sleep. If you find no other spot then we will go down on that one the next time it is in position under us, in about twelve hours." "You don't want to visit any of the other areas first? Somewhere away from the thoughtful creature?" "No. The rest of the world may be dangerous. There must be a reason that thought is in one spot only. If we find no others then we will go down boldly and visit this." So they all, except Steiner, went off to their bunks then: Stark, the Captain; Gregory Gilbert, the executive officer; Wolfgang Langweilig, the engineer; Casper Craig, super-cargo, tycoon and 51% owner of the Little Probe, and F. R. Briton, S.J., a Jesuit priest who was linguist and checker champion of the craft. Dawn did not come to the moon-town. The Little Probe hovered stationary in the light and the moon-town came up under the dawn. Then the Probe went down to visit whatever was there. "There's no town," said Steiner. "Not a building. Yet we're on the track of the minds. There's nothing but a meadow and some boscage, a sort of fountain or pool, and four streams coming out of it." "Keep on towards the minds," said Stark. "They're our target." "Not a building, not two sticks or stones placed together. That looks like an Earth-type sheep there. And that looks like an Earth-lion, I'm almost afraid to say. And those two ... why, they could well be Earth-people. But with a difference. Where is that bright light coming from?" "I don't know, but they're right in the middle of it. Land here. We'll go to meet them at once. Timidity has never been an efficacious tool with us." Well, they were people. And one could only wish that all people were like them. There was a man and a woman, and they were clothed either in very bright garments or in no garments at all, but only in a very bright light. "Talk to them, Father Briton," said Stark. "You are the linguist." "Howdy," said the priest. He may or may not have been understood, but the two of them smiled at him, so he went on. "Father Briton from Philadelphia," he said, "on detached service. And you, my good man, what is your handle, your monicker, your tag?" "Ha-Adamah," said the man. "And your daughter, or niece?" It may be that the shining man frowned momentarily at this; but the woman smiled, proving that she was human. "The woman is named Hawwah," said the man. "The sheep is named sheep, the lion is named lion, the horse is named horse and the hoolock is named hoolock." "I understand. It is possible that this could go on and on. How is it that you use the English tongue?" "I have only one tongue; but it is given to us to be understood by all; by the eagle, by the squirrel, by the ass, by the English." "We happen to be bloody Yankees, but we use a borrowed tongue. You wouldn't have a drink on you for a tubful of thirsty travellers, would you?" "The fountain." "Ah—I see." But the crew all drank of the fountain to be sociable. It was water, but water that excelled, cool and with all its original bubbles like the first water ever made. "What do you make of them?" asked Stark. "Human," said Steiner. "It may even be that they are a little more than human. I don't understand that light that surrounds them. And they seem to be clothed, as it were, in dignity." "And very little else," said Father Briton, "though that light trick does serve a purpose. But I'm not sure they'd pass in Philadelphia." "Talk to them again," said Stark. "You're the linguist." "That isn't necessary here, Captain. Talk to them yourself." "Are there any other people here?" Stark asked the man. "The two of us. Man and woman." "But are there any others?" "How would there be any others? What other kind of people could there be than man and woman?" "But is there more than one man or woman?" "How could there be more than one of anything?" The captain was a little puzzled by this, but he went on doggedly: "Ha-Adamah, what do you think that we are? Are we not people?" "You are not anything till I name you. But I will name you and then you can be. You are named Captain. He is named Priest. He is named Engineer. He is named Flunky." "Thanks a lot," said Steiner. "But are we not people?" persisted Captain Stark. "No. We are the people. There are no people but two. How could there be other people?" "And the damnest thing about it," muttered Langweilig, "is, how are you going to prove him wrong? But it does give you a small feeling." "Can we have something to eat?" asked the Captain. "Pick from the trees," said Ha-Adamah, "and then it may be that you will want to sleep on the grass. Being not of human nature (which does not need sleep or rest), it may be that you require respite. But you are free to enjoy the garden and its fruits." "We will," said Captain Stark. They wandered about the place, but they were uneasy. There were the animals. The lion and lioness were enough to make one cautious, though they offered no harm. The two bears had a puzzling look, as though they wanted either to frolic with you or to mangle you. "If there are only two people here," said Casper Craig, "then it may be that the rest of the world is not dangerous at all. It looked fertile wherever we scanned it, though not so fertile as this central bit. And those rocks would bear examining." "Flecked with gold, and possibly with something else," said Stark. "A very promising site." "And everything grows here," added Steiner. "Those are Earth-fruits and I never saw finer. I've tasted the grapes and plums and pears. The figs and dates are superb, the quince is as flavorsome as a quince can be, the cherries are excellent. And I never did taste such oranges. But I haven't yet tried the—" and he stopped. "If you're thinking what I'm afraid to think," said Gilbert, "then it will be the test at least: whether we're having a pleasant dream or whether this is reality. Go ahead and eat one." "I won't be the first to eat one. You eat." "Ask him first. You ask him." "Ha-Adamah, is it allowed to eat the apples?" "Certainly. Eat. It is the finest fruit in the garden." "Well, the analogy breaks down there," said Stark. "I was almost beginning to believe in the thing. But if it isn't that, then what. Father Briton, you are the linguist, but in Hebrew does not Ha-Adamah and Hawwah mean—?" "Of course they do. You know that as well as I." "I was never a believer. But would it be possible for the exact same proposition to maintain here as on Earth?" "All things are possible." And it was then that Ha-Adamah, the shining man, gave a wild cry: "No, no. Do not approach it. It is not allowed to eat of that one!" It was the pomegranate tree, and he was warning Langweilig away from it. "Once more, Father," said Stark, "you should be the authority; but does not the idea that it was the apple that was forbidden go back only to a medieval painting?" "It does. The name of the fruit is not mentioned in Genesis. In Hebrew exegesis, however, the pomegranate is usually indicated." "I thought so. Question the man further, Father. This is too incredible." "It is a little odd. Adam, old man, how long have you been here?" "Forever less six days is the answer that has been given to me. I never did understand the answer, however." "And have you gotten no older in all that time?" "I do not understand what 'older' is. I am as I have been from the beginning." "And do you think that you will ever die?" "To die I do not understand. I am taught that it is a property of fallen nature to die, and that does not pertain to me or mine." "And are you completely happy here?" "Perfectly happy according to my preternatural state. But I am taught that it might be possible to lose that happiness, and then to seek it vainly through all the ages. I am taught that sickness and ageing and even death could come if this happiness were ever lost. I am taught that on at least one other unfortunate world it has actually been lost." "Do you consider yourself a knowledgeable man?" "Yes, since I am the only man, and knowledge is natural to man. But I am further blessed. I have a preternatural intellect." Then Stark cut in once more: "There must be some one question you could ask him, Father. Some way to settle it. I am becoming nearly convinced." "Yes, there is a question that will settle it. Adam, old man, how about a game of checkers?" "This is hardly the time for clowning," said Stark. "I'm not clowning, Captain. How about it, Adam? I'll give you choice of colors and first move." "No. It would be no contest. I have a preternatural intellect." "Well, I beat a barber who was champion of Germantown. And I beat the champion of Morgan County, Tennessee, which is the hottest checker center on Earth. I've played against, and beaten, machines. But I never played a preternatural mind. Let's just set up the board, Adam, and have a go at it." "No. It would be no contest. I would not like to humble you." They were there for three days. They were delighted with the place. It was a world with everything, and it seemed to have only two inhabitants. They went everywhere except into the big cave. "What is there, Adam?" asked Captain Stark. "The great serpent lives there. I would not disturb him. He has long been cranky because plans he had for us did not materialize. But we are taught that should ever evil come to us, which it cannot if we persevere, it will come by him." They learned no more of the real nature of the sphere in their time there. Yet all but one of them were convinced of the reality when they left. And they talked of it as they took off. "A crowd would laugh if told of it," said Stark, "but not many would laugh if they had actually seen the place, or them. I am not a gullible man, but I am convinced of this: that this is a pristine and pure world and that ours and all the others we have visited are fallen worlds. Here are the prototypes of our first parents before their fall. They are garbed in light and innocence, and they have the happiness that we have been seeking for centuries. It would be a crime if anyone disturbed that happiness." "I too am convinced," said Steiner. "It is Paradise itself, where the lion lies down with the lamb, and where the serpent has not prevailed. It would be the darkest of crimes if we or others should play the part of the serpent, and intrude and spoil." "I am probably the most skeptical man in the world," said Casper Craig the tycoon, "but I do believe my eyes. I have been there and seen it. It is indeed an unspoiled Paradise; and it would be a crime calling to the wide heavens for vengeance for anyone to smirch in any way that perfection. "So much for that. Now to business. Gilbert, take a gram: Ninety Million Square Miles of Pristine Paradise for Sale or Lease. Farming, Ranching, exceptional opportunities for Horticulture. Gold, Silver, Iron, Earth-Type Fauna. Terms. Special Rates for Large Settlement Parties. Write, Gram, or call in person at any of our planetary offices as listed below. Ask for Brochure—Eden Acres Unlimited." Down in the great cave that Old Serpent, a two-legged one among whose names were "Snake-Oil Sam," spoke to his underlings: "It'll take them fourteen days to get back with the settlers. We'll have time to overhaul the blasters. We haven't had any well-equipped settlers for six weeks. It used to be we'd hardly have time to strip and slaughter and stow before there was another batch to take care of." "I think you'd better write me some new lines," said Adam. "I feel like a goof saying those same ones to each bunch." "You are a goof, and therefore perfect for the part. I was in show business long enough to know never to change a line too soon. I did change Adam and Eve to Ha-Adamah and Hawwah, and the apple to the pomegranate. People aren't becoming any smarter—but they are becoming better researched, and they insist on authenticity. "This is still a perfect come-on here. There is something in human nature that cannot resist the idea of a Perfect Paradise. Folks will whoop and holler to their neighbors to come in droves to spoil and mar it. It isn't greed or the desire for new land so much—though that is strong too. Mainly it is the feverish passion to befoul and poison what is unspoiled. Fortunately I am sagacious enough to take advantage of this trait. And when you start to farm a new world on a shoestring you have to acquire your equipment as you can." He looked proudly around at the great cave with its mountains and tiers of materials, heavy machinery of all sorts, titanic crates of foodstuff space-sealed; wheeled, tracked, propped, vaned and jetted vehicles; and power packs to run a world. He looked at the three dozen space ships stripped and stacked, and at the rather large pile of bone-meal in one corner. "We will have to have another lion," said Eve. "Bowser is getting old, and Marie-Yvette abuses him and gnaws his toes. And we do have to have a big-maned lion to lie down with the lamb." "I know it, Eve. The lion is a very important prop. Maybe one of the crackpot settlers will bring a new lion." "And can't you mix another kind of shining paint? This itches. It's hell." "I'm working on it." Casper Craig was still dictating the gram: "Amazing quality of longevity seemingly inherent in the locale. Climate ideal. Daylight or half-light. All twenty-one hours from Planet Delphina and from Sol. Pure water for all industrial purposes. Scenic and storied. Zoning and pre-settlement restrictions to insure congenial neighbors. A completely planned globular settlement in a near arm of our own galaxy. Low taxes and liberal credit. Financing our specialty—" "And you had better have an armed escort when you return," said Father Briton. "Why in cosmos would we want an armed escort?" "It's as phony as a seven-credit note!" "You, a man of the cloth doubt it? And us ready skeptics convinced by our senses? Why do you doubt?" "It is only the unbelieving who believe so easily in obvious frauds. Theologically unsound, dramaturgically weak, philologically impossible, zoologically rigged, salted conspicuously with gold and shot through with anachronisms. And moreover he was afraid to play me at checkers." "What?" "If I have a preternatural intellect I wouldn't be afraid of a game of checkers with anyone. Yet there was an unusual mind there somewhere; it was just that he chose not to make our acquaintance personally." "They looked at the priest thoughtfully. "But it was Paradise in one way," said Steiner at last. "How?" "All the time we were there the woman did not speak."

How is human fallenness explored as a theme?

3

Human fallenness can be interpreted as the degraded state of mankind, or as inauthenticity in human interaction. These are both important themes to this story. In terms of inauthenticity, this is the root of the interactions on the surface of the moon. As the crew of the Little Probe is exploring the area where the two humanoids are living, everything they encounter is a carefully staged ploy. The two people on the surface do not let on any of the truth of their situation to the crew, and deliberately lie to them in order to entice them to come back to settle on the moon. This is ironic, as the serpent’s plan for this ruse is heavily based on others’ desires for authenticity in the story they are presented, thus the small changes in various iterations of this illusion of the biblical story of Adam and Eve. In terms of degradation, another central idea is that this moon is a pure and untouched place. However, the serpent knows that this will entice humans to investigate and try to settle there, because of an innate draw to spoil things that are in perfect condition. The crew of the Little Probe recognize this idea in a different way, in that they see this moon as what humankind could have been before it fell, when Adam and Eve fell to temptation. They see this as innocence that would be a crime to ruin, and know that humans of their own world would be inclined to disrupt what was there.

61007

IT WAS A DULL, ROUTINE LITTLE WORLD. IT DIDN'T EVEN HAVE A CITY. EVERYTHING IT HAD WAS IN THE GARDEN BY R. A. LAFFERTY [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, March 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] The protozoic recorder chirped like a bird. Not only would there be life traces on that little moon, but it would be a lively place. So they skipped several steps in the procedure. The chordata discerner read Positive over most of the surface. There was spinal fluid on that orb, rivers of it. So again they omitted several tests and went to the cognition scanner. Would it show Thought on the body? Naturally they did not get results at once, nor did they expect to; it required a fine adjustment. But they were disappointed that they found nothing for several hours as they hovered high over the rotation. Then it came—clearly and definitely, but from quite a small location only. "Limited," said Steiner, "as though within a pale. As though there were but one city, if that is its form. Shall we follow the rest of the surface to find another, or concentrate on this? It'll be twelve hours before it's back in our ken if we let it go now." "Let's lock on this one and finish the scan. Then we can do the rest of the world to make sure we've missed nothing," said Stark. There was one more test to run, one very tricky and difficult of analysis, that with the Extraordinary Perception Locator. This was designed simply to locate a source of superior thought. But this might be so varied or so unfamiliar that often both the machine and the designer of it were puzzled as to how to read the results. The E. P. Locator had been designed by Glaser. But when the Locator had refused to read Positive when turned on the inventor himself, bad blood developed between machine and man. Glaser knew that he had extraordinary perception. He was a much honored man in his field. He told the machine so heatedly. The machine replied, with such warmth that its relays chattered, that Glaser did not have extraordinary perception; he had only ordinary perception to an extraordinary degree. There is a difference , the machine insisted. It was for this reason that Glaser used that model no more, but built others more amenable. And it was for this reason also that the owners of Little Probe had acquired the original machine so cheaply. And there was no denying that the Extraordinary Perception Locator (or Eppel) was a contrary machine. On Earth it had read Positive on a number of crack-pots, including Waxey Sax, a jazz tootler who could not even read music. But it had also read Positive on ninety per cent of the acknowledged superior minds of the Earth. In space it had been a sound guide to the unusual intelligences encountered. Yet on Suzuki-Mi it had read Positive on a two-inch-long worm, only one of them out of billions. For the countless identical worms no trace of anything at all was shown by the test. So it was with mixed expectations that Steiner locked onto the area and got a flick. He then narrowed to a smaller area (apparently one individual, though this could not be certain) and got very definite action. Eppel was busy. The machine had a touch of the ham in it, and assumed an air of importance when it ran these tests. Finally it signaled the result, the most exasperating result it ever produces: the single orange light. It was the equivalent of the shrug of the shoulders in a man. They called it the "You tell me light." So among the intelligences there was at least one that might be extraordinary, though possibly in a crackpot way. It is good to be forewarned. "Scan the remainder of the world, Steiner," said Stark, "and the rest of us will get some sleep. If you find no other spot then we will go down on that one the next time it is in position under us, in about twelve hours." "You don't want to visit any of the other areas first? Somewhere away from the thoughtful creature?" "No. The rest of the world may be dangerous. There must be a reason that thought is in one spot only. If we find no others then we will go down boldly and visit this." So they all, except Steiner, went off to their bunks then: Stark, the Captain; Gregory Gilbert, the executive officer; Wolfgang Langweilig, the engineer; Casper Craig, super-cargo, tycoon and 51% owner of the Little Probe, and F. R. Briton, S.J., a Jesuit priest who was linguist and checker champion of the craft. Dawn did not come to the moon-town. The Little Probe hovered stationary in the light and the moon-town came up under the dawn. Then the Probe went down to visit whatever was there. "There's no town," said Steiner. "Not a building. Yet we're on the track of the minds. There's nothing but a meadow and some boscage, a sort of fountain or pool, and four streams coming out of it." "Keep on towards the minds," said Stark. "They're our target." "Not a building, not two sticks or stones placed together. That looks like an Earth-type sheep there. And that looks like an Earth-lion, I'm almost afraid to say. And those two ... why, they could well be Earth-people. But with a difference. Where is that bright light coming from?" "I don't know, but they're right in the middle of it. Land here. We'll go to meet them at once. Timidity has never been an efficacious tool with us." Well, they were people. And one could only wish that all people were like them. There was a man and a woman, and they were clothed either in very bright garments or in no garments at all, but only in a very bright light. "Talk to them, Father Briton," said Stark. "You are the linguist." "Howdy," said the priest. He may or may not have been understood, but the two of them smiled at him, so he went on. "Father Briton from Philadelphia," he said, "on detached service. And you, my good man, what is your handle, your monicker, your tag?" "Ha-Adamah," said the man. "And your daughter, or niece?" It may be that the shining man frowned momentarily at this; but the woman smiled, proving that she was human. "The woman is named Hawwah," said the man. "The sheep is named sheep, the lion is named lion, the horse is named horse and the hoolock is named hoolock." "I understand. It is possible that this could go on and on. How is it that you use the English tongue?" "I have only one tongue; but it is given to us to be understood by all; by the eagle, by the squirrel, by the ass, by the English." "We happen to be bloody Yankees, but we use a borrowed tongue. You wouldn't have a drink on you for a tubful of thirsty travellers, would you?" "The fountain." "Ah—I see." But the crew all drank of the fountain to be sociable. It was water, but water that excelled, cool and with all its original bubbles like the first water ever made. "What do you make of them?" asked Stark. "Human," said Steiner. "It may even be that they are a little more than human. I don't understand that light that surrounds them. And they seem to be clothed, as it were, in dignity." "And very little else," said Father Briton, "though that light trick does serve a purpose. But I'm not sure they'd pass in Philadelphia." "Talk to them again," said Stark. "You're the linguist." "That isn't necessary here, Captain. Talk to them yourself." "Are there any other people here?" Stark asked the man. "The two of us. Man and woman." "But are there any others?" "How would there be any others? What other kind of people could there be than man and woman?" "But is there more than one man or woman?" "How could there be more than one of anything?" The captain was a little puzzled by this, but he went on doggedly: "Ha-Adamah, what do you think that we are? Are we not people?" "You are not anything till I name you. But I will name you and then you can be. You are named Captain. He is named Priest. He is named Engineer. He is named Flunky." "Thanks a lot," said Steiner. "But are we not people?" persisted Captain Stark. "No. We are the people. There are no people but two. How could there be other people?" "And the damnest thing about it," muttered Langweilig, "is, how are you going to prove him wrong? But it does give you a small feeling." "Can we have something to eat?" asked the Captain. "Pick from the trees," said Ha-Adamah, "and then it may be that you will want to sleep on the grass. Being not of human nature (which does not need sleep or rest), it may be that you require respite. But you are free to enjoy the garden and its fruits." "We will," said Captain Stark. They wandered about the place, but they were uneasy. There were the animals. The lion and lioness were enough to make one cautious, though they offered no harm. The two bears had a puzzling look, as though they wanted either to frolic with you or to mangle you. "If there are only two people here," said Casper Craig, "then it may be that the rest of the world is not dangerous at all. It looked fertile wherever we scanned it, though not so fertile as this central bit. And those rocks would bear examining." "Flecked with gold, and possibly with something else," said Stark. "A very promising site." "And everything grows here," added Steiner. "Those are Earth-fruits and I never saw finer. I've tasted the grapes and plums and pears. The figs and dates are superb, the quince is as flavorsome as a quince can be, the cherries are excellent. And I never did taste such oranges. But I haven't yet tried the—" and he stopped. "If you're thinking what I'm afraid to think," said Gilbert, "then it will be the test at least: whether we're having a pleasant dream or whether this is reality. Go ahead and eat one." "I won't be the first to eat one. You eat." "Ask him first. You ask him." "Ha-Adamah, is it allowed to eat the apples?" "Certainly. Eat. It is the finest fruit in the garden." "Well, the analogy breaks down there," said Stark. "I was almost beginning to believe in the thing. But if it isn't that, then what. Father Briton, you are the linguist, but in Hebrew does not Ha-Adamah and Hawwah mean—?" "Of course they do. You know that as well as I." "I was never a believer. But would it be possible for the exact same proposition to maintain here as on Earth?" "All things are possible." And it was then that Ha-Adamah, the shining man, gave a wild cry: "No, no. Do not approach it. It is not allowed to eat of that one!" It was the pomegranate tree, and he was warning Langweilig away from it. "Once more, Father," said Stark, "you should be the authority; but does not the idea that it was the apple that was forbidden go back only to a medieval painting?" "It does. The name of the fruit is not mentioned in Genesis. In Hebrew exegesis, however, the pomegranate is usually indicated." "I thought so. Question the man further, Father. This is too incredible." "It is a little odd. Adam, old man, how long have you been here?" "Forever less six days is the answer that has been given to me. I never did understand the answer, however." "And have you gotten no older in all that time?" "I do not understand what 'older' is. I am as I have been from the beginning." "And do you think that you will ever die?" "To die I do not understand. I am taught that it is a property of fallen nature to die, and that does not pertain to me or mine." "And are you completely happy here?" "Perfectly happy according to my preternatural state. But I am taught that it might be possible to lose that happiness, and then to seek it vainly through all the ages. I am taught that sickness and ageing and even death could come if this happiness were ever lost. I am taught that on at least one other unfortunate world it has actually been lost." "Do you consider yourself a knowledgeable man?" "Yes, since I am the only man, and knowledge is natural to man. But I am further blessed. I have a preternatural intellect." Then Stark cut in once more: "There must be some one question you could ask him, Father. Some way to settle it. I am becoming nearly convinced." "Yes, there is a question that will settle it. Adam, old man, how about a game of checkers?" "This is hardly the time for clowning," said Stark. "I'm not clowning, Captain. How about it, Adam? I'll give you choice of colors and first move." "No. It would be no contest. I have a preternatural intellect." "Well, I beat a barber who was champion of Germantown. And I beat the champion of Morgan County, Tennessee, which is the hottest checker center on Earth. I've played against, and beaten, machines. But I never played a preternatural mind. Let's just set up the board, Adam, and have a go at it." "No. It would be no contest. I would not like to humble you." They were there for three days. They were delighted with the place. It was a world with everything, and it seemed to have only two inhabitants. They went everywhere except into the big cave. "What is there, Adam?" asked Captain Stark. "The great serpent lives there. I would not disturb him. He has long been cranky because plans he had for us did not materialize. But we are taught that should ever evil come to us, which it cannot if we persevere, it will come by him." They learned no more of the real nature of the sphere in their time there. Yet all but one of them were convinced of the reality when they left. And they talked of it as they took off. "A crowd would laugh if told of it," said Stark, "but not many would laugh if they had actually seen the place, or them. I am not a gullible man, but I am convinced of this: that this is a pristine and pure world and that ours and all the others we have visited are fallen worlds. Here are the prototypes of our first parents before their fall. They are garbed in light and innocence, and they have the happiness that we have been seeking for centuries. It would be a crime if anyone disturbed that happiness." "I too am convinced," said Steiner. "It is Paradise itself, where the lion lies down with the lamb, and where the serpent has not prevailed. It would be the darkest of crimes if we or others should play the part of the serpent, and intrude and spoil." "I am probably the most skeptical man in the world," said Casper Craig the tycoon, "but I do believe my eyes. I have been there and seen it. It is indeed an unspoiled Paradise; and it would be a crime calling to the wide heavens for vengeance for anyone to smirch in any way that perfection. "So much for that. Now to business. Gilbert, take a gram: Ninety Million Square Miles of Pristine Paradise for Sale or Lease. Farming, Ranching, exceptional opportunities for Horticulture. Gold, Silver, Iron, Earth-Type Fauna. Terms. Special Rates for Large Settlement Parties. Write, Gram, or call in person at any of our planetary offices as listed below. Ask for Brochure—Eden Acres Unlimited." Down in the great cave that Old Serpent, a two-legged one among whose names were "Snake-Oil Sam," spoke to his underlings: "It'll take them fourteen days to get back with the settlers. We'll have time to overhaul the blasters. We haven't had any well-equipped settlers for six weeks. It used to be we'd hardly have time to strip and slaughter and stow before there was another batch to take care of." "I think you'd better write me some new lines," said Adam. "I feel like a goof saying those same ones to each bunch." "You are a goof, and therefore perfect for the part. I was in show business long enough to know never to change a line too soon. I did change Adam and Eve to Ha-Adamah and Hawwah, and the apple to the pomegranate. People aren't becoming any smarter—but they are becoming better researched, and they insist on authenticity. "This is still a perfect come-on here. There is something in human nature that cannot resist the idea of a Perfect Paradise. Folks will whoop and holler to their neighbors to come in droves to spoil and mar it. It isn't greed or the desire for new land so much—though that is strong too. Mainly it is the feverish passion to befoul and poison what is unspoiled. Fortunately I am sagacious enough to take advantage of this trait. And when you start to farm a new world on a shoestring you have to acquire your equipment as you can." He looked proudly around at the great cave with its mountains and tiers of materials, heavy machinery of all sorts, titanic crates of foodstuff space-sealed; wheeled, tracked, propped, vaned and jetted vehicles; and power packs to run a world. He looked at the three dozen space ships stripped and stacked, and at the rather large pile of bone-meal in one corner. "We will have to have another lion," said Eve. "Bowser is getting old, and Marie-Yvette abuses him and gnaws his toes. And we do have to have a big-maned lion to lie down with the lamb." "I know it, Eve. The lion is a very important prop. Maybe one of the crackpot settlers will bring a new lion." "And can't you mix another kind of shining paint? This itches. It's hell." "I'm working on it." Casper Craig was still dictating the gram: "Amazing quality of longevity seemingly inherent in the locale. Climate ideal. Daylight or half-light. All twenty-one hours from Planet Delphina and from Sol. Pure water for all industrial purposes. Scenic and storied. Zoning and pre-settlement restrictions to insure congenial neighbors. A completely planned globular settlement in a near arm of our own galaxy. Low taxes and liberal credit. Financing our specialty—" "And you had better have an armed escort when you return," said Father Briton. "Why in cosmos would we want an armed escort?" "It's as phony as a seven-credit note!" "You, a man of the cloth doubt it? And us ready skeptics convinced by our senses? Why do you doubt?" "It is only the unbelieving who believe so easily in obvious frauds. Theologically unsound, dramaturgically weak, philologically impossible, zoologically rigged, salted conspicuously with gold and shot through with anachronisms. And moreover he was afraid to play me at checkers." "What?" "If I have a preternatural intellect I wouldn't be afraid of a game of checkers with anyone. Yet there was an unusual mind there somewhere; it was just that he chose not to make our acquaintance personally." "They looked at the priest thoughtfully. "But it was Paradise in one way," said Steiner at last. "How?" "All the time we were there the woman did not speak."

How is human fallenness explored as a theme?

6

The story of Adam and Eve ends with human failure. Eve, or Hawwah, eats the apple/pomegranate that God told them not to eat. And so she is cursed with painful birth, toiling the land, and eventual return to dust, or death. Both she and Adam are expelled from Eden and their expulsion leads to the creation of other humans. There is no longer one Man or Woman. However in this story, the destruction of paradise is brought about by two separate groups. The Serpent’s crew of actors and props creates a false paradise to lure people in and pillage them. This in itself is an example of human fallenness, failure, or expulsion from Eden. By extorting the idea of paradise and using it to harm others, the Serpent and his crew are fallen humans. And so are the crew of the visiting spaceship. After discovering so-called paradise, their first thought is to destroy it. Their tools are farming, building, and burning, but not preserving. Human greed is what led to the falling, and is also what led to the falling of these two crews.

49165

Brightside Crossing by Alan E. Nourse JAMES BARON was not pleased to hear that he had had a visitor when he reached the Red Lion that evening. He had no stomach for mysteries, vast or trifling, and there were pressing things to think about at this time. Yet the doorman had flagged him as he came in from the street: “A thousand pardons, Mr. Baron. The gentleman—he would leave no name. He said you’d want to see him. He will be back by eight.” Now Baron drummed his fingers on the table top, staring about the quiet lounge. Street trade was discouraged at the Red Lion, gently but persuasively; the patrons were few in number. Across to the right was a group that Baron knew vaguely—Andean climbers, or at least two of them were. Over near the door he recognized old Balmer, who had mapped the first passage to the core of Vulcan Crater on Venus. Baron returned his smile with a nod. Then he settled back and waited impatiently for the intruder who demanded his time without justifying it. Presently a small, grizzled man crossed the room and sat down at Baron’s table. He was short and wiry. His face held no key to his age—he might have been thirty or a thousand—but he looked weary and immensely ugly. His cheeks and forehead were twisted and brown, with scars that were still healing. The stranger said, “I’m glad you waited. I’ve heard you’re planning to attempt the Brightside.” Baron stared at the man for a moment. “I see you can read telecasts,” he said coldly. “The news was correct. We are going to make a Brightside Crossing.” “At perihelion?” “Of course. When else?” The grizzled man searched Baron’s face for a moment without expression. Then he said slowly, “No, I’m afraid you’re not going to make the Crossing.” “Say, who are you, if you don’t mind?” Baron demanded. “The name is Claney,” said the stranger. There was a silence. Then: “Claney? Peter Claney?” “That’s right.” Baron’s eyes were wide with excitement, all trace of anger gone. “Great balls of fire, man— where have you been hiding? We’ve been trying to contact you for months!” “I know. I was hoping you’d quit looking and chuck the whole idea.” “Quit looking!” Baron bent forward over the table. “My friend, we’d given up hope, but we’ve never quit looking. Here, have a drink. There’s so much you can tell us.” His fingers were trembling. Peter Claney shook his head. “I can’t tell you anything you want to hear.” “But you’ve got to. You’re the only man on Earth who’s attempted a Brightside Crossing and lived through it! And the story you cleared for the news—it was nothing. We need details . Where did your equipment fall down? Where did you miscalculate? What were the trouble spots?” Baron jabbed a finger at Claney’s face. “That, for instance—epithelioma? Why? What was wrong with your glass? Your filters? We’ve got to know those things. If you can tell us, we can make it across where your attempt failed—” “You want to know why we failed?” asked Claney. “Of course we want to know. We have to know.” “It’s simple. We failed because it can’t be done. We couldn’t do it and neither can you. No human beings will ever cross the Brightside alive, not if they try for centuries.” “Nonsense,” Baron declared. “We will.” Claney shrugged. “I was there. I know what I’m saying. You can blame the equipment or the men—there were flaws in both quarters—but we just didn’t know what we were fighting. It was the planet that whipped us, that and the Sun . They’ll whip you, too, if you try it.” “Never,” said Baron. “Let me tell you,” Peter Claney said. I’d been interested in the Brightside for almost as long as I can remember (Claney said). I guess I was about ten when Wyatt and Carpenter made the last attempt—that was in 2082, I think. I followed the news stories like a tri-V serial and then I was heartbroken when they just disappeared. I know now that they were a pair of idiots, starting off without proper equipment, with practically no knowledge of surface conditions, without any charts—they couldn’t have made a hundred miles—but I didn’t know that then and it was a terrible tragedy. After that, I followed Sanderson’s work in the Twilight Lab up there and began to get Brightside into my blood, sure as death. But it was Mikuta’s idea to attempt a Crossing. Did you ever know Tom Mikuta? I don’t suppose you did. No, not Japanese—Polish-American. He was a major in the Interplanetary Service for some years and hung onto the title after he gave up his commission. He was with Armstrong on Mars during his Service days, did a good deal of the original mapping and surveying for the Colony there. I first met him on Venus; we spent five years together up there doing some of the nastiest exploring since the Matto Grasso. Then he made the attempt on Vulcan Crater that paved the way for Balmer a few years later. I’d always liked the Major—he was big and quiet and cool, the sort of guy who always had things figured a little further ahead than anyone else and always knew what to do in a tight place. Too many men in this game are all nerve and luck, with no judgment. The Major had both. He also had the kind of personality that could take a crew of wild men and make them work like a well-oiled machine across a thousand miles of Venus jungle. I liked him and I trusted him. He contacted me in New York and he was very casual at first. We spent an evening here at the Red Lion, talking about old times; he told me about the Vulcan business, and how he’d been out to see Sanderson and the Twilight Lab on Mercury, and how he preferred a hot trek to a cold one any day of the year—and then he wanted to know what I’d been doing since Venus and what my plans were. “No particular plans,” I told him. “Why?” He looked me over. “How much do you weigh, Peter?” I told him one-thirty-five. “That much!” he said. “Well, there can’t be much fat on you, at any rate. How do you take heat?” “You should know,” I said. “Venus was no icebox.” “No, I mean real heat.” Then I began to get it. “You’re planning a trip.” “That’s right. A hot trip.” He grinned at me. “Might be dangerous, too.” “What trip?” “Brightside of Mercury,” the Major said. I whistled cautiously. “At aphelion?” He threw his head back. “Why try a Crossing at aphelion? What have you done then? Four thousand miles of butcherous heat, just to have some joker come along, use your data and drum you out of the glory by crossing at perihelion forty-four days later? No, thanks. I want the Brightside without any nonsense about it.” He leaned across me eagerly. “I want to make a Crossing at perihelion and I want to cross on the surface. If a man can do that, he’s got Mercury. Until then, nobody’s got Mercury. I want Mercury—but I’ll need help getting it.” I’d thought of it a thousand times and never dared consider it. Nobody had, since Wyatt and Carpenter disappeared. Mercury turns on its axis in the same time that it wheels around the Sun, which means that the Brightside is always facing in. That makes the Brightside of Mercury at perihelion the hottest place in the Solar System, with one single exception: the surface of the Sun itself. It would be a hellish trek. Only a few men had ever learned just how hellish and they never came back to tell about it. It was a real hell’s Crossing, but someday, I thought, somebody would cross it. I wanted to be along. The Twilight Lab, near the northern pole of Mercury, was the obvious jumping-off place. The setup there wasn’t very extensive—a rocket landing, the labs and quarters for Sanderson’s crew sunk deep into the crust, and the tower that housed the Solar ’scope that Sanderson had built up there ten years before. Twilight Lab wasn’t particularly interested in the Brightside, of course—the Sun was Sanderson’s baby and he’d picked Mercury as the closest chunk of rock to the Sun that could hold his observatory. He’d chosen a good location, too. On Mercury, the Brightside temperature hits 770° F. at perihelion and the Darkside runs pretty constant at -410° F. No permanent installation with a human crew could survive at either extreme. But with Mercury’s wobble, the twilight zone between Brightside and Darkside offers something closer to survival temperatures. Sanderson built the Lab up near the pole, where the zone is about five miles wide, so the temperature only varies 50 to 60 degrees with the libration. The Solar ’scope could take that much change and they’d get good clear observation of the Sun for about seventy out of the eighty-eight days it takes the planet to wheel around. The Major was counting on Sanderson knowing something about Mercury as well as the Sun when we camped at the Lab to make final preparations. Sanderson did. He thought we’d lost our minds and he said so, but he gave us all the help he could. He spent a week briefing Jack Stone, the third member of our party, who had arrived with the supplies and equipment a few days earlier. Poor Jack met us at the rocket landing almost bawling, Sanderson had given him such a gloomy picture of what Brightside was like. Stone was a youngster—hardly twenty-five, I’d say—but he’d been with the Major at Vulcan and had begged to join this trek. I had a funny feeling that Jack really didn’t care for exploring too much, but he thought Mikuta was God, followed him around like a puppy. It didn’t matter to me as long as he knew what he was getting in for. You don’t go asking people in this game why they do it—they’re liable to get awfully uneasy and none of them can ever give you an answer that makes sense. Anyway, Stone had borrowed three men from the Lab, and had the supplies and equipment all lined up when we got there, ready to check and test. We dug right in. With plenty of funds—tri-V money and some government cash the Major had talked his way around—our equipment was new and good. Mikuta had done the designing and testing himself, with a big assist from Sanderson. We had four Bugs, three of them the light pillow-tire models, with special lead-cooled cut-in engines when the heat set in, and one heavy-duty tractor model for pulling the sledges. The Major went over them like a kid at the circus. Then he said, “Have you heard anything from McIvers?” “Who’s he?” Stone wanted to know. “He’ll be joining us. He’s a good man—got quite a name for climbing, back home.” The Major turned to me. “You’ve probably heard of him.” I’d heard plenty of stories about Ted McIvers and I wasn’t too happy to hear that he was joining us. “Kind of a daredevil, isn’t he?” “Maybe. He’s lucky and skillful. Where do you draw the line? We’ll need plenty of both.” “Have you ever worked with him?” I asked. “No. Are you worried?” “Not exactly. But Brightside is no place to count on luck.” The Major laughed. “I don’t think we need to worry about McIvers. We understood each other when I talked up the trip to him and we’re going to need each other too much to do any fooling around.” He turned back to the supply list. “Meanwhile, let’s get this stuff listed and packed. We’ll need to cut weight sharply and our time is short. Sanderson says we should leave in three days.” Two days later, McIvers hadn’t arrived. The Major didn’t say much about it. Stone was getting edgy and so was I. We spent the second day studying charts of the Brightside, such as they were. The best available were pretty poor, taken from so far out that the detail dissolved into blurs on blow-up. They showed the biggest ranges of peaks and craters and faults, and that was all. Still, we could use them to plan a broad outline of our course. “This range here,” the Major said as we crowded around the board, “is largely inactive, according to Sanderson. But these to the south and west could be active. Seismograph tracings suggest a lot of activity in that region, getting worse down toward the equator—not only volcanic, but sub-surface shifting.” Stone nodded. “Sanderson told me there was probably constant surface activity.” The Major shrugged. “Well, it’s treacherous, there’s no doubt of it. But the only way to avoid it is to travel over the Pole, which would lose us days and offer us no guarantee of less activity to the west. Now we might avoid some if we could find a pass through this range and cut sharp east—” It seemed that the more we considered the problem, the further we got from a solution. We knew there were active volcanoes on the Brightside—even on the Darkside, though surface activity there was pretty much slowed down and localized. But there were problems of atmosphere on Brightside, as well. There was an atmosphere and a constant atmospheric flow from Brightside to Darkside. Not much—the lighter gases had reached escape velocity and disappeared from Brightside millennia ago—but there was CO 2 , and nitrogen, and traces of other heavier gases. There was also an abundance of sulfur vapor, as well as carbon disulfide and sulfur dioxide. The atmospheric tide moved toward the Darkside, where it condensed, carrying enough volcanic ash with it for Sanderson to estimate the depth and nature of the surface upheavals on Brightside from his samplings. The trick was to find a passage that avoided those upheavals as far as possible. But in the final analysis, we were barely scraping the surface. The only way we would find out what was happening where was to be there. Finally, on the third day, McIvers blew in on a freight rocket from Venus. He’d missed the ship that the Major and I had taken by a few hours, and had conned his way to Venus in hopes of getting a hop from there. He didn’t seem too upset about it, as though this were his usual way of doing things and he couldn’t see why everyone should get so excited. He was a tall, rangy man with long, wavy hair prematurely gray, and the sort of eyes that looked like a climber’s—half-closed, sleepy, almost indolent, but capable of abrupt alertness. And he never stood still; he was always moving, always doing something with his hands, or talking, or pacing about. Evidently the Major decided not to press the issue of his arrival. There was still work to do, and an hour later we were running the final tests on the pressure suits. That evening, Stone and McIvers were thick as thieves, and everything was set for an early departure after we got some rest. “And that,” said Baron, finishing his drink and signaling the waiter for another pair, “was your first big mistake.” Peter Claney raised his eyebrows. “McIvers?” “Of course.” Claney shrugged, glanced at the small quiet tables around them. “There are lots of bizarre personalities around a place like this, and some of the best wouldn’t seem to be the most reliable at first glance. Anyway, personality problems weren’t our big problem right then. Equipment worried us first and route next.” Baron nodded in agreement. “What kind of suits did you have?” “The best insulating suits ever made,” said Claney. “Each one had an inner lining of a fiberglass modification, to avoid the clumsiness of asbestos, and carried the refrigerating unit and oxygen storage which we recharged from the sledges every eight hours. Outer layer carried a monomolecular chrome reflecting surface that made us glitter like Christmas trees. And we had a half-inch dead-air space under positive pressure between the two layers. Warning thermocouples, of course—at 770 degrees, it wouldn’t take much time to fry us to cinders if the suits failed somewhere.” “How about the Bugs?” “They were insulated, too, but we weren’t counting on them too much for protection.” “You weren’t!” Baron exclaimed. “Why not?” “We’d be in and out of them too much. They gave us mobility and storage, but we knew we’d have to do a lot of forward work on foot.” Claney smiled bitterly. “Which meant that we had an inch of fiberglass and a half-inch of dead air between us and a surface temperature where lead flowed like water and zinc was almost at melting point and the pools of sulfur in the shadows were boiling like oatmeal over a campfire.” Baron licked his lips. His fingers stroked the cool, wet glass as he set it down on the tablecloth. “Go on,” he said tautly. “You started on schedule?” “Oh, yes,” said Claney, “we started on schedule, all right. We just didn’t quite end on schedule, that was all. But I’m getting to that.” He settled back in his chair and continued. We jumped off from Twilight on a course due southeast with thirty days to make it to the Center of Brightside. If we could cross an average of seventy miles a day, we could hit Center exactly at perihelion, the point of Mercury’s closest approach to the Sun—which made Center the hottest part of the planet at the hottest it ever gets. The Sun was already huge and yellow over the horizon when we started, twice the size it appears on Earth. Every day that Sun would grow bigger and whiter, and every day the surface would get hotter. But once we reached Center, the job was only half done—we would still have to travel another two thousand miles to the opposite twilight zone. Sanderson was to meet us on the other side in the Laboratory’s scout ship, approximately sixty days from the time we jumped off. That was the plan, in outline. It was up to us to cross those seventy miles a day, no matter how hot it became, no matter what terrain we had to cross. Detours would be dangerous and time-consuming. Delays could cost us our lives. We all knew that. The Major briefed us on details an hour before we left. “Peter, you’ll take the lead Bug, the small one we stripped down for you. Stone and I will flank you on either side, giving you a hundred-yard lead. McIvers, you’ll have the job of dragging the sledges, so we’ll have to direct your course pretty closely. Peter’s job is to pick the passage at any given point. If there’s any doubt of safe passage, we’ll all explore ahead on foot before we risk the Bugs. Got that?” McIvers and Stone exchanged glances. McIvers said: “Jack and I were planning to change around. We figured he could take the sledges. That would give me a little more mobility.” The Major looked up sharply at Stone. “Do you buy that, Jack?” Stone shrugged. “I don’t mind. Mac wanted—” McIvers made an impatient gesture with his hands. “It doesn’t matter. I just feel better when I’m on the move. Does it make any difference?” “I guess it doesn’t,” said the Major. “Then you’ll flank Peter along with me. Right?” “Sure, sure.” McIvers pulled at his lower lip. “Who’s going to do the advance scouting?” “It sounds like I am,” I cut in. “We want to keep the lead Bug light as possible.” Mikuta nodded. “That’s right. Peter’s Bug is stripped down to the frame and wheels.” McIvers shook his head. “No, I mean the advance work. You need somebody out ahead—four or five miles, at least—to pick up the big flaws and active surface changes, don’t you?” He stared at the Major. “I mean, how can we tell what sort of a hole we may be moving into, unless we have a scout up ahead?” “That’s what we have the charts for,” the Major said sharply. “Charts! I’m talking about detail work. We don’t need to worry about the major topography. It’s the little faults you can’t see on the pictures that can kill us.” He tossed the charts down excitedly. “Look, let me take a Bug out ahead and work reconnaissance, keep five, maybe ten miles ahead of the column. I can stay on good solid ground, of course, but scan the area closely and radio back to Peter where to avoid the flaws. Then—” “No dice,” the Major broke in. “But why not? We could save ourselves days!” “I don’t care what we could save. We stay together. When we get to the Center, I want live men along with me. That means we stay within easy sight of each other at all times. Any climber knows that everybody is safer in a party than one man alone—any time, any place.” McIvers stared at him, his cheeks an angry red. Finally he gave a sullen nod. “Okay. If you say so.” “Well, I say so and I mean it. I don’t want any fancy stuff. We’re going to hit Center together, and finish the Crossing together. Got that?” McIvers nodded. Mikuta then looked at Stone and me and we nodded, too. “All right,” he said slowly. “Now that we’ve got it straight, let’s go.” It was hot. If I forget everything else about that trek, I’ll never forget that huge yellow Sun glaring down, without a break, hotter and hotter with every mile. We knew that the first few days would be the easiest and we were rested and fresh when we started down the long ragged gorge southeast of the Twilight Lab. I moved out first; back over my shoulder, I could see the Major and McIvers crawling out behind me, their pillow tires taking the rugged floor of the gorge smoothly. Behind them, Stone dragged the sledges. Even at only 30 per cent Earth gravity they were a strain on the big tractor, until the ski-blades bit into the fluffy volcanic ash blanketing the valley. We even had a path to follow for the first twenty miles. I kept my eyes pasted to the big polaroid binocs, picking out the track the early research teams had made out into the edge of Brightside. But in a couple of hours we rumbled past Sanderson’s little outpost observatory and the tracks stopped. We were in virgin territory and already the Sun was beginning to bite. We didn’t feel the heat so much those first days out. We saw it. The refrig units kept our skins at a nice comfortable seventy-five degrees Fahrenheit inside our suits, but our eyes watched that glaring Sun and the baked yellow rocks going past, and some nerve pathways got twisted up, somehow. We poured sweat as if we were in a superheated furnace. We drove eight hours and slept five. When a sleep period came due, we pulled the Bugs together into a square, threw up a light aluminum sun-shield and lay out in the dust and rocks. The sun-shield cut the temperature down sixty or seventy degrees, for whatever help that was. And then we ate from the forward sledge—sucking through tubes—protein, carbohydrates, bulk gelatin, vitamins. The Major measured water out with an iron hand, because we’d have drunk ourselves into nephritis in a week otherwise. We were constantly, unceasingly thirsty. Ask the physiologists and psychiatrists why—they can give you have a dozen interesting reasons—but all we knew, or cared about, was that it happened to be so. We didn’t sleep the first few stops, as a consequence. Our eyes burned in spite of the filters and we had roaring headaches, but we couldn’t sleep them off. We sat around looking at each other. Then McIvers would say how good a beer would taste, and off we’d go. We’d have murdered our grandmothers for one ice-cold bottle of beer. After a few driving periods, I began to get my bearings at the wheel. We were moving down into desolation that made Earth’s old Death Valley look like a Japanese rose garden. Huge sun-baked cracks opened up in the floor of the gorge, with black cliffs jutting up on either side; the air was filled with a barely visible yellowish mist of sulfur and sulfurous gases. It was a hot, barren hole, no place for any man to go, but the challenge was so powerful you could almost feel it. No one had ever crossed this land before and escaped. Those who had tried it had been cruelly punished, but the land was still there, so it had to be crossed. Not the easy way. It had to be crossed the hardest way possible: overland, through anything the land could throw up to us, at the most difficult time possible. Yet we knew that even the land might have been conquered before, except for that Sun. We’d fought absolute cold before and won. We’d never fought heat like this and won. The only worse heat in the Solar System was the surface of the Sun itself. Brightside was worth trying for. We would get it or it would get us. That was the bargain. I learned a lot about Mercury those first few driving periods. The gorge petered out after a hundred miles and we moved onto the slope of a range of ragged craters that ran south and east. This range had shown no activity since the first landing on Mercury forty years before, but beyond it there were active cones. Yellow fumes rose from the craters constantly; their sides were shrouded with heavy ash. We couldn’t detect a wind, but we knew there was a hot, sulfurous breeze sweeping in great continental tides across the face of the planet. Not enough for erosion, though. The craters rose up out of jagged gorges, huge towering spears of rock and rubble. Below were the vast yellow flatlands, smoking and hissing from the gases beneath the crust. Over everything was gray dust—silicates and salts, pumice and limestone and granite ash, filling crevices and declivities—offering a soft, treacherous surface for the Bug’s pillow tires. I learned to read the ground, to tell a covered fault by the sag of the dust; I learned to spot a passable crack, and tell it from an impassable cut. Time after time the Bugs ground to a halt while we explored a passage on foot, tied together with light copper cable, digging, advancing, digging some more until we were sure the surface would carry the machines. It was cruel work; we slept in exhaustion. But it went smoothly, at first. Too smoothly, it seemed to me, and the others seemed to think so, too. McIvers’ restlessness was beginning to grate on our nerves. He talked too much, while we were resting or while we were driving; wisecracks, witticisms, unfunny jokes that wore thin with repetition. He took to making side trips from the route now and then, never far, but a little further each time. Jack Stone reacted quite the opposite; he grew quieter with each stop, more reserved and apprehensive. I didn’t like it, but I figured that it would pass off after a while. I was apprehensive enough myself; I just managed to hide it better. And every mile the Sun got bigger and whiter and higher in the sky and hotter. Without our ultra-violet screens and glare filters we would have been blinded; as it was our eyes ached constantly and the skin on our faces itched and tingled at the end of an eight-hour trek. But it took one of those side trips of McIvers’ to deliver the penultimate blow to our already fraying nerves. He had driven down a side-branch of a long canyon running off west of our route and was almost out of sight in a cloud of ash when we heard a sharp cry through our earphones. I wheeled my Bug around with my heart in my throat and spotted him through the binocs, waving frantically from the top of his machine. The Major and I took off, lumbering down the gulch after him as fast as the Bugs could go, with a thousand horrible pictures racing through our minds.... We found him standing stock-still, pointing down the gorge and, for once, he didn’t have anything to say. It was the wreck of a Bug; an old-fashioned half-track model of the sort that hadn’t been in use for years. It was wedged tight in a cut in the rock, an axle broken, its casing split wide open up the middle, half-buried in a rock slide. A dozen feet away were two insulated suits with white bones gleaming through the fiberglass helmets. This was as far as Wyatt and Carpenter had gotten on their Brightside Crossing. On the fifth driving period out, the terrain began to change. It looked the same, but every now and then it felt different. On two occasions I felt my wheels spin, with a howl of protest from my engine. Then, quite suddenly, the Bug gave a lurch; I gunned my motor and nothing happened. I could see the dull gray stuff seeping up around the hubs, thick and tenacious, splattering around in steaming gobs as the wheels spun. I knew what had happened the moment the wheels gave and, a few minutes later, they chained me to the tractor and dragged me back out of the mire. It looked for all the world like thick gray mud, but it was a pit of molten lead, steaming under a soft layer of concealing ash. I picked my way more cautiously then. We were getting into an area of recent surface activity; the surface was really treacherous. I caught myself wishing that the Major had okayed McIvers’ scheme for an advanced scout; more dangerous for the individual, maybe, but I was driving blind now and I didn’t like it. One error in judgment could sink us all, but I wasn’t thinking much about the others. I was worried about me , plenty worried. I kept thinking, better McIvers should go than me. It wasn’t healthy thinking and I knew it, but I couldn’t get the thought out of my mind. It was a grueling eight hours and we slept poorly. Back in the Bug again, we moved still more slowly—edging out on a broad flat plateau, dodging a network of gaping surface cracks—winding back and forth in an effort to keep the machines on solid rock. I couldn’t see far ahead, because of the yellow haze rising from the cracks, so I was almost on top of it when I saw a sharp cut ahead where the surface dropped six feet beyond a deep crack. I let out a shout to halt the others; then I edged my Bug forward, peering at the cleft. It was deep and wide. I moved fifty yards to the left, then back to the right. There was only one place that looked like a possible crossing; a long, narrow ledge of gray stuff that lay down across a section of the fault like a ramp. Even as I watched it, I could feel the surface crust under the Bug trembling and saw the ledge shift over a few feet.

What is the plot of the story?

6

James Baron is planning a trek to Brightside Crossing on Mercury, a feat so far unaccomplished. Few had tried, and those that did died. All except for one. He is asked to wait at the Red Baron as someone wanted to see him at 8. He waits patiently and is rewarded with the company of Peter Claney, the man who made it back home. Claney instantly tells him to give up on the journey and stay on Earth. Baron asks for details about their trek and what went wrong, but Claney refuses to give him the details. Claney is an older man now with an epithelioma on his face. Although he came to warn him, he quickly learns that Baron may only listen if he hears the truth. So Claney recounts the story. Major Tom Mikuta recruited Claney, Jack Stone, and Ted McIvers to join him. They were to adventure to the Brightside Crossing at perihelion, a more dangerous journey. Temperatures reached up to 770 degrees Fahrenheit at perihelion, but Mikuta was an all-or-nothing man. Stone arrived on Mercury first, soon followed by Mikuta and Claney. McIvers was the last to arrive and they left soon after with three Bugs and one tractor dragging the sledges. Stone was briefed by Sanderson, the head of the observatory, before they left, and the men pored over all images and maps of the Crossing before beginning. Despite their high-tech spacesuits and general gadgets, the giant sun still got to them. They were constantly thirsty and hot, and their skin itched and burned. They drove for eight hours, then slept for five. They needed to travel 70 miles a day. It would take 30 days to reach the Center, and then another 30 to reach the pick-up spot. The journey quickly took a toll on Stone, who was the most apprehensive of the bunch. He retreats into himself, while McIvers chatters nonstop to fill the silence. Tension grew among the crew, especially as McIvers put himself at risk by adventuring away from them. Claney lead the gang in his Bug, while McIvers and Mikuta flanked him. Stone was in the very back. If Claney saw something suspicious or unsafe, they would investigate on foot before continuing in their equipment. As they travel, they got closer to the Sun, which appeared to be twice as big as it did on Earth. Several drives into their journey, McIvers discovered something truly terrible on one of his forrays. He screamed into the intercom, alerting the others who quickly rushed after him. He stood there, pointing below. There lay a broken, older Bug and two corpses. Wyatt and Carpenter, the original discoverers. They continued on with disheartened spirits until Claney reached a cleft. There was no way to cross it, except for a very small and dangerous ledge. The cleft slowly began to crumble under their Bugs and they’re left in a very precarious position.

49165

Brightside Crossing by Alan E. Nourse JAMES BARON was not pleased to hear that he had had a visitor when he reached the Red Lion that evening. He had no stomach for mysteries, vast or trifling, and there were pressing things to think about at this time. Yet the doorman had flagged him as he came in from the street: “A thousand pardons, Mr. Baron. The gentleman—he would leave no name. He said you’d want to see him. He will be back by eight.” Now Baron drummed his fingers on the table top, staring about the quiet lounge. Street trade was discouraged at the Red Lion, gently but persuasively; the patrons were few in number. Across to the right was a group that Baron knew vaguely—Andean climbers, or at least two of them were. Over near the door he recognized old Balmer, who had mapped the first passage to the core of Vulcan Crater on Venus. Baron returned his smile with a nod. Then he settled back and waited impatiently for the intruder who demanded his time without justifying it. Presently a small, grizzled man crossed the room and sat down at Baron’s table. He was short and wiry. His face held no key to his age—he might have been thirty or a thousand—but he looked weary and immensely ugly. His cheeks and forehead were twisted and brown, with scars that were still healing. The stranger said, “I’m glad you waited. I’ve heard you’re planning to attempt the Brightside.” Baron stared at the man for a moment. “I see you can read telecasts,” he said coldly. “The news was correct. We are going to make a Brightside Crossing.” “At perihelion?” “Of course. When else?” The grizzled man searched Baron’s face for a moment without expression. Then he said slowly, “No, I’m afraid you’re not going to make the Crossing.” “Say, who are you, if you don’t mind?” Baron demanded. “The name is Claney,” said the stranger. There was a silence. Then: “Claney? Peter Claney?” “That’s right.” Baron’s eyes were wide with excitement, all trace of anger gone. “Great balls of fire, man— where have you been hiding? We’ve been trying to contact you for months!” “I know. I was hoping you’d quit looking and chuck the whole idea.” “Quit looking!” Baron bent forward over the table. “My friend, we’d given up hope, but we’ve never quit looking. Here, have a drink. There’s so much you can tell us.” His fingers were trembling. Peter Claney shook his head. “I can’t tell you anything you want to hear.” “But you’ve got to. You’re the only man on Earth who’s attempted a Brightside Crossing and lived through it! And the story you cleared for the news—it was nothing. We need details . Where did your equipment fall down? Where did you miscalculate? What were the trouble spots?” Baron jabbed a finger at Claney’s face. “That, for instance—epithelioma? Why? What was wrong with your glass? Your filters? We’ve got to know those things. If you can tell us, we can make it across where your attempt failed—” “You want to know why we failed?” asked Claney. “Of course we want to know. We have to know.” “It’s simple. We failed because it can’t be done. We couldn’t do it and neither can you. No human beings will ever cross the Brightside alive, not if they try for centuries.” “Nonsense,” Baron declared. “We will.” Claney shrugged. “I was there. I know what I’m saying. You can blame the equipment or the men—there were flaws in both quarters—but we just didn’t know what we were fighting. It was the planet that whipped us, that and the Sun . They’ll whip you, too, if you try it.” “Never,” said Baron. “Let me tell you,” Peter Claney said. I’d been interested in the Brightside for almost as long as I can remember (Claney said). I guess I was about ten when Wyatt and Carpenter made the last attempt—that was in 2082, I think. I followed the news stories like a tri-V serial and then I was heartbroken when they just disappeared. I know now that they were a pair of idiots, starting off without proper equipment, with practically no knowledge of surface conditions, without any charts—they couldn’t have made a hundred miles—but I didn’t know that then and it was a terrible tragedy. After that, I followed Sanderson’s work in the Twilight Lab up there and began to get Brightside into my blood, sure as death. But it was Mikuta’s idea to attempt a Crossing. Did you ever know Tom Mikuta? I don’t suppose you did. No, not Japanese—Polish-American. He was a major in the Interplanetary Service for some years and hung onto the title after he gave up his commission. He was with Armstrong on Mars during his Service days, did a good deal of the original mapping and surveying for the Colony there. I first met him on Venus; we spent five years together up there doing some of the nastiest exploring since the Matto Grasso. Then he made the attempt on Vulcan Crater that paved the way for Balmer a few years later. I’d always liked the Major—he was big and quiet and cool, the sort of guy who always had things figured a little further ahead than anyone else and always knew what to do in a tight place. Too many men in this game are all nerve and luck, with no judgment. The Major had both. He also had the kind of personality that could take a crew of wild men and make them work like a well-oiled machine across a thousand miles of Venus jungle. I liked him and I trusted him. He contacted me in New York and he was very casual at first. We spent an evening here at the Red Lion, talking about old times; he told me about the Vulcan business, and how he’d been out to see Sanderson and the Twilight Lab on Mercury, and how he preferred a hot trek to a cold one any day of the year—and then he wanted to know what I’d been doing since Venus and what my plans were. “No particular plans,” I told him. “Why?” He looked me over. “How much do you weigh, Peter?” I told him one-thirty-five. “That much!” he said. “Well, there can’t be much fat on you, at any rate. How do you take heat?” “You should know,” I said. “Venus was no icebox.” “No, I mean real heat.” Then I began to get it. “You’re planning a trip.” “That’s right. A hot trip.” He grinned at me. “Might be dangerous, too.” “What trip?” “Brightside of Mercury,” the Major said. I whistled cautiously. “At aphelion?” He threw his head back. “Why try a Crossing at aphelion? What have you done then? Four thousand miles of butcherous heat, just to have some joker come along, use your data and drum you out of the glory by crossing at perihelion forty-four days later? No, thanks. I want the Brightside without any nonsense about it.” He leaned across me eagerly. “I want to make a Crossing at perihelion and I want to cross on the surface. If a man can do that, he’s got Mercury. Until then, nobody’s got Mercury. I want Mercury—but I’ll need help getting it.” I’d thought of it a thousand times and never dared consider it. Nobody had, since Wyatt and Carpenter disappeared. Mercury turns on its axis in the same time that it wheels around the Sun, which means that the Brightside is always facing in. That makes the Brightside of Mercury at perihelion the hottest place in the Solar System, with one single exception: the surface of the Sun itself. It would be a hellish trek. Only a few men had ever learned just how hellish and they never came back to tell about it. It was a real hell’s Crossing, but someday, I thought, somebody would cross it. I wanted to be along. The Twilight Lab, near the northern pole of Mercury, was the obvious jumping-off place. The setup there wasn’t very extensive—a rocket landing, the labs and quarters for Sanderson’s crew sunk deep into the crust, and the tower that housed the Solar ’scope that Sanderson had built up there ten years before. Twilight Lab wasn’t particularly interested in the Brightside, of course—the Sun was Sanderson’s baby and he’d picked Mercury as the closest chunk of rock to the Sun that could hold his observatory. He’d chosen a good location, too. On Mercury, the Brightside temperature hits 770° F. at perihelion and the Darkside runs pretty constant at -410° F. No permanent installation with a human crew could survive at either extreme. But with Mercury’s wobble, the twilight zone between Brightside and Darkside offers something closer to survival temperatures. Sanderson built the Lab up near the pole, where the zone is about five miles wide, so the temperature only varies 50 to 60 degrees with the libration. The Solar ’scope could take that much change and they’d get good clear observation of the Sun for about seventy out of the eighty-eight days it takes the planet to wheel around. The Major was counting on Sanderson knowing something about Mercury as well as the Sun when we camped at the Lab to make final preparations. Sanderson did. He thought we’d lost our minds and he said so, but he gave us all the help he could. He spent a week briefing Jack Stone, the third member of our party, who had arrived with the supplies and equipment a few days earlier. Poor Jack met us at the rocket landing almost bawling, Sanderson had given him such a gloomy picture of what Brightside was like. Stone was a youngster—hardly twenty-five, I’d say—but he’d been with the Major at Vulcan and had begged to join this trek. I had a funny feeling that Jack really didn’t care for exploring too much, but he thought Mikuta was God, followed him around like a puppy. It didn’t matter to me as long as he knew what he was getting in for. You don’t go asking people in this game why they do it—they’re liable to get awfully uneasy and none of them can ever give you an answer that makes sense. Anyway, Stone had borrowed three men from the Lab, and had the supplies and equipment all lined up when we got there, ready to check and test. We dug right in. With plenty of funds—tri-V money and some government cash the Major had talked his way around—our equipment was new and good. Mikuta had done the designing and testing himself, with a big assist from Sanderson. We had four Bugs, three of them the light pillow-tire models, with special lead-cooled cut-in engines when the heat set in, and one heavy-duty tractor model for pulling the sledges. The Major went over them like a kid at the circus. Then he said, “Have you heard anything from McIvers?” “Who’s he?” Stone wanted to know. “He’ll be joining us. He’s a good man—got quite a name for climbing, back home.” The Major turned to me. “You’ve probably heard of him.” I’d heard plenty of stories about Ted McIvers and I wasn’t too happy to hear that he was joining us. “Kind of a daredevil, isn’t he?” “Maybe. He’s lucky and skillful. Where do you draw the line? We’ll need plenty of both.” “Have you ever worked with him?” I asked. “No. Are you worried?” “Not exactly. But Brightside is no place to count on luck.” The Major laughed. “I don’t think we need to worry about McIvers. We understood each other when I talked up the trip to him and we’re going to need each other too much to do any fooling around.” He turned back to the supply list. “Meanwhile, let’s get this stuff listed and packed. We’ll need to cut weight sharply and our time is short. Sanderson says we should leave in three days.” Two days later, McIvers hadn’t arrived. The Major didn’t say much about it. Stone was getting edgy and so was I. We spent the second day studying charts of the Brightside, such as they were. The best available were pretty poor, taken from so far out that the detail dissolved into blurs on blow-up. They showed the biggest ranges of peaks and craters and faults, and that was all. Still, we could use them to plan a broad outline of our course. “This range here,” the Major said as we crowded around the board, “is largely inactive, according to Sanderson. But these to the south and west could be active. Seismograph tracings suggest a lot of activity in that region, getting worse down toward the equator—not only volcanic, but sub-surface shifting.” Stone nodded. “Sanderson told me there was probably constant surface activity.” The Major shrugged. “Well, it’s treacherous, there’s no doubt of it. But the only way to avoid it is to travel over the Pole, which would lose us days and offer us no guarantee of less activity to the west. Now we might avoid some if we could find a pass through this range and cut sharp east—” It seemed that the more we considered the problem, the further we got from a solution. We knew there were active volcanoes on the Brightside—even on the Darkside, though surface activity there was pretty much slowed down and localized. But there were problems of atmosphere on Brightside, as well. There was an atmosphere and a constant atmospheric flow from Brightside to Darkside. Not much—the lighter gases had reached escape velocity and disappeared from Brightside millennia ago—but there was CO 2 , and nitrogen, and traces of other heavier gases. There was also an abundance of sulfur vapor, as well as carbon disulfide and sulfur dioxide. The atmospheric tide moved toward the Darkside, where it condensed, carrying enough volcanic ash with it for Sanderson to estimate the depth and nature of the surface upheavals on Brightside from his samplings. The trick was to find a passage that avoided those upheavals as far as possible. But in the final analysis, we were barely scraping the surface. The only way we would find out what was happening where was to be there. Finally, on the third day, McIvers blew in on a freight rocket from Venus. He’d missed the ship that the Major and I had taken by a few hours, and had conned his way to Venus in hopes of getting a hop from there. He didn’t seem too upset about it, as though this were his usual way of doing things and he couldn’t see why everyone should get so excited. He was a tall, rangy man with long, wavy hair prematurely gray, and the sort of eyes that looked like a climber’s—half-closed, sleepy, almost indolent, but capable of abrupt alertness. And he never stood still; he was always moving, always doing something with his hands, or talking, or pacing about. Evidently the Major decided not to press the issue of his arrival. There was still work to do, and an hour later we were running the final tests on the pressure suits. That evening, Stone and McIvers were thick as thieves, and everything was set for an early departure after we got some rest. “And that,” said Baron, finishing his drink and signaling the waiter for another pair, “was your first big mistake.” Peter Claney raised his eyebrows. “McIvers?” “Of course.” Claney shrugged, glanced at the small quiet tables around them. “There are lots of bizarre personalities around a place like this, and some of the best wouldn’t seem to be the most reliable at first glance. Anyway, personality problems weren’t our big problem right then. Equipment worried us first and route next.” Baron nodded in agreement. “What kind of suits did you have?” “The best insulating suits ever made,” said Claney. “Each one had an inner lining of a fiberglass modification, to avoid the clumsiness of asbestos, and carried the refrigerating unit and oxygen storage which we recharged from the sledges every eight hours. Outer layer carried a monomolecular chrome reflecting surface that made us glitter like Christmas trees. And we had a half-inch dead-air space under positive pressure between the two layers. Warning thermocouples, of course—at 770 degrees, it wouldn’t take much time to fry us to cinders if the suits failed somewhere.” “How about the Bugs?” “They were insulated, too, but we weren’t counting on them too much for protection.” “You weren’t!” Baron exclaimed. “Why not?” “We’d be in and out of them too much. They gave us mobility and storage, but we knew we’d have to do a lot of forward work on foot.” Claney smiled bitterly. “Which meant that we had an inch of fiberglass and a half-inch of dead air between us and a surface temperature where lead flowed like water and zinc was almost at melting point and the pools of sulfur in the shadows were boiling like oatmeal over a campfire.” Baron licked his lips. His fingers stroked the cool, wet glass as he set it down on the tablecloth. “Go on,” he said tautly. “You started on schedule?” “Oh, yes,” said Claney, “we started on schedule, all right. We just didn’t quite end on schedule, that was all. But I’m getting to that.” He settled back in his chair and continued. We jumped off from Twilight on a course due southeast with thirty days to make it to the Center of Brightside. If we could cross an average of seventy miles a day, we could hit Center exactly at perihelion, the point of Mercury’s closest approach to the Sun—which made Center the hottest part of the planet at the hottest it ever gets. The Sun was already huge and yellow over the horizon when we started, twice the size it appears on Earth. Every day that Sun would grow bigger and whiter, and every day the surface would get hotter. But once we reached Center, the job was only half done—we would still have to travel another two thousand miles to the opposite twilight zone. Sanderson was to meet us on the other side in the Laboratory’s scout ship, approximately sixty days from the time we jumped off. That was the plan, in outline. It was up to us to cross those seventy miles a day, no matter how hot it became, no matter what terrain we had to cross. Detours would be dangerous and time-consuming. Delays could cost us our lives. We all knew that. The Major briefed us on details an hour before we left. “Peter, you’ll take the lead Bug, the small one we stripped down for you. Stone and I will flank you on either side, giving you a hundred-yard lead. McIvers, you’ll have the job of dragging the sledges, so we’ll have to direct your course pretty closely. Peter’s job is to pick the passage at any given point. If there’s any doubt of safe passage, we’ll all explore ahead on foot before we risk the Bugs. Got that?” McIvers and Stone exchanged glances. McIvers said: “Jack and I were planning to change around. We figured he could take the sledges. That would give me a little more mobility.” The Major looked up sharply at Stone. “Do you buy that, Jack?” Stone shrugged. “I don’t mind. Mac wanted—” McIvers made an impatient gesture with his hands. “It doesn’t matter. I just feel better when I’m on the move. Does it make any difference?” “I guess it doesn’t,” said the Major. “Then you’ll flank Peter along with me. Right?” “Sure, sure.” McIvers pulled at his lower lip. “Who’s going to do the advance scouting?” “It sounds like I am,” I cut in. “We want to keep the lead Bug light as possible.” Mikuta nodded. “That’s right. Peter’s Bug is stripped down to the frame and wheels.” McIvers shook his head. “No, I mean the advance work. You need somebody out ahead—four or five miles, at least—to pick up the big flaws and active surface changes, don’t you?” He stared at the Major. “I mean, how can we tell what sort of a hole we may be moving into, unless we have a scout up ahead?” “That’s what we have the charts for,” the Major said sharply. “Charts! I’m talking about detail work. We don’t need to worry about the major topography. It’s the little faults you can’t see on the pictures that can kill us.” He tossed the charts down excitedly. “Look, let me take a Bug out ahead and work reconnaissance, keep five, maybe ten miles ahead of the column. I can stay on good solid ground, of course, but scan the area closely and radio back to Peter where to avoid the flaws. Then—” “No dice,” the Major broke in. “But why not? We could save ourselves days!” “I don’t care what we could save. We stay together. When we get to the Center, I want live men along with me. That means we stay within easy sight of each other at all times. Any climber knows that everybody is safer in a party than one man alone—any time, any place.” McIvers stared at him, his cheeks an angry red. Finally he gave a sullen nod. “Okay. If you say so.” “Well, I say so and I mean it. I don’t want any fancy stuff. We’re going to hit Center together, and finish the Crossing together. Got that?” McIvers nodded. Mikuta then looked at Stone and me and we nodded, too. “All right,” he said slowly. “Now that we’ve got it straight, let’s go.” It was hot. If I forget everything else about that trek, I’ll never forget that huge yellow Sun glaring down, without a break, hotter and hotter with every mile. We knew that the first few days would be the easiest and we were rested and fresh when we started down the long ragged gorge southeast of the Twilight Lab. I moved out first; back over my shoulder, I could see the Major and McIvers crawling out behind me, their pillow tires taking the rugged floor of the gorge smoothly. Behind them, Stone dragged the sledges. Even at only 30 per cent Earth gravity they were a strain on the big tractor, until the ski-blades bit into the fluffy volcanic ash blanketing the valley. We even had a path to follow for the first twenty miles. I kept my eyes pasted to the big polaroid binocs, picking out the track the early research teams had made out into the edge of Brightside. But in a couple of hours we rumbled past Sanderson’s little outpost observatory and the tracks stopped. We were in virgin territory and already the Sun was beginning to bite. We didn’t feel the heat so much those first days out. We saw it. The refrig units kept our skins at a nice comfortable seventy-five degrees Fahrenheit inside our suits, but our eyes watched that glaring Sun and the baked yellow rocks going past, and some nerve pathways got twisted up, somehow. We poured sweat as if we were in a superheated furnace. We drove eight hours and slept five. When a sleep period came due, we pulled the Bugs together into a square, threw up a light aluminum sun-shield and lay out in the dust and rocks. The sun-shield cut the temperature down sixty or seventy degrees, for whatever help that was. And then we ate from the forward sledge—sucking through tubes—protein, carbohydrates, bulk gelatin, vitamins. The Major measured water out with an iron hand, because we’d have drunk ourselves into nephritis in a week otherwise. We were constantly, unceasingly thirsty. Ask the physiologists and psychiatrists why—they can give you have a dozen interesting reasons—but all we knew, or cared about, was that it happened to be so. We didn’t sleep the first few stops, as a consequence. Our eyes burned in spite of the filters and we had roaring headaches, but we couldn’t sleep them off. We sat around looking at each other. Then McIvers would say how good a beer would taste, and off we’d go. We’d have murdered our grandmothers for one ice-cold bottle of beer. After a few driving periods, I began to get my bearings at the wheel. We were moving down into desolation that made Earth’s old Death Valley look like a Japanese rose garden. Huge sun-baked cracks opened up in the floor of the gorge, with black cliffs jutting up on either side; the air was filled with a barely visible yellowish mist of sulfur and sulfurous gases. It was a hot, barren hole, no place for any man to go, but the challenge was so powerful you could almost feel it. No one had ever crossed this land before and escaped. Those who had tried it had been cruelly punished, but the land was still there, so it had to be crossed. Not the easy way. It had to be crossed the hardest way possible: overland, through anything the land could throw up to us, at the most difficult time possible. Yet we knew that even the land might have been conquered before, except for that Sun. We’d fought absolute cold before and won. We’d never fought heat like this and won. The only worse heat in the Solar System was the surface of the Sun itself. Brightside was worth trying for. We would get it or it would get us. That was the bargain. I learned a lot about Mercury those first few driving periods. The gorge petered out after a hundred miles and we moved onto the slope of a range of ragged craters that ran south and east. This range had shown no activity since the first landing on Mercury forty years before, but beyond it there were active cones. Yellow fumes rose from the craters constantly; their sides were shrouded with heavy ash. We couldn’t detect a wind, but we knew there was a hot, sulfurous breeze sweeping in great continental tides across the face of the planet. Not enough for erosion, though. The craters rose up out of jagged gorges, huge towering spears of rock and rubble. Below were the vast yellow flatlands, smoking and hissing from the gases beneath the crust. Over everything was gray dust—silicates and salts, pumice and limestone and granite ash, filling crevices and declivities—offering a soft, treacherous surface for the Bug’s pillow tires. I learned to read the ground, to tell a covered fault by the sag of the dust; I learned to spot a passable crack, and tell it from an impassable cut. Time after time the Bugs ground to a halt while we explored a passage on foot, tied together with light copper cable, digging, advancing, digging some more until we were sure the surface would carry the machines. It was cruel work; we slept in exhaustion. But it went smoothly, at first. Too smoothly, it seemed to me, and the others seemed to think so, too. McIvers’ restlessness was beginning to grate on our nerves. He talked too much, while we were resting or while we were driving; wisecracks, witticisms, unfunny jokes that wore thin with repetition. He took to making side trips from the route now and then, never far, but a little further each time. Jack Stone reacted quite the opposite; he grew quieter with each stop, more reserved and apprehensive. I didn’t like it, but I figured that it would pass off after a while. I was apprehensive enough myself; I just managed to hide it better. And every mile the Sun got bigger and whiter and higher in the sky and hotter. Without our ultra-violet screens and glare filters we would have been blinded; as it was our eyes ached constantly and the skin on our faces itched and tingled at the end of an eight-hour trek. But it took one of those side trips of McIvers’ to deliver the penultimate blow to our already fraying nerves. He had driven down a side-branch of a long canyon running off west of our route and was almost out of sight in a cloud of ash when we heard a sharp cry through our earphones. I wheeled my Bug around with my heart in my throat and spotted him through the binocs, waving frantically from the top of his machine. The Major and I took off, lumbering down the gulch after him as fast as the Bugs could go, with a thousand horrible pictures racing through our minds.... We found him standing stock-still, pointing down the gorge and, for once, he didn’t have anything to say. It was the wreck of a Bug; an old-fashioned half-track model of the sort that hadn’t been in use for years. It was wedged tight in a cut in the rock, an axle broken, its casing split wide open up the middle, half-buried in a rock slide. A dozen feet away were two insulated suits with white bones gleaming through the fiberglass helmets. This was as far as Wyatt and Carpenter had gotten on their Brightside Crossing. On the fifth driving period out, the terrain began to change. It looked the same, but every now and then it felt different. On two occasions I felt my wheels spin, with a howl of protest from my engine. Then, quite suddenly, the Bug gave a lurch; I gunned my motor and nothing happened. I could see the dull gray stuff seeping up around the hubs, thick and tenacious, splattering around in steaming gobs as the wheels spun. I knew what had happened the moment the wheels gave and, a few minutes later, they chained me to the tractor and dragged me back out of the mire. It looked for all the world like thick gray mud, but it was a pit of molten lead, steaming under a soft layer of concealing ash. I picked my way more cautiously then. We were getting into an area of recent surface activity; the surface was really treacherous. I caught myself wishing that the Major had okayed McIvers’ scheme for an advanced scout; more dangerous for the individual, maybe, but I was driving blind now and I didn’t like it. One error in judgment could sink us all, but I wasn’t thinking much about the others. I was worried about me , plenty worried. I kept thinking, better McIvers should go than me. It wasn’t healthy thinking and I knew it, but I couldn’t get the thought out of my mind. It was a grueling eight hours and we slept poorly. Back in the Bug again, we moved still more slowly—edging out on a broad flat plateau, dodging a network of gaping surface cracks—winding back and forth in an effort to keep the machines on solid rock. I couldn’t see far ahead, because of the yellow haze rising from the cracks, so I was almost on top of it when I saw a sharp cut ahead where the surface dropped six feet beyond a deep crack. I let out a shout to halt the others; then I edged my Bug forward, peering at the cleft. It was deep and wide. I moved fifty yards to the left, then back to the right. There was only one place that looked like a possible crossing; a long, narrow ledge of gray stuff that lay down across a section of the fault like a ramp. Even as I watched it, I could feel the surface crust under the Bug trembling and saw the ledge shift over a few feet.

What is the plot of the story?

10

The story is about a man, Baron, who is planning to cross the bright side of the planet Mercury. Right before the trip is about to depart he runs into one of the famous adventurers that attempted it before him, Peter Claney, at a bar called the Red Lion. Peter goes into a long recollection of his experience to Baron, which is interspersed with them snapping back to reality at the bar. Peter’s attempted Brightside crossing involved a party of four: the Major (a trusted team captain of sorts), himself (who would be in the lead Bug of the expedition), McIver (who would flank one side of Peter along with the Major), and Stone (who would drag the sledges). They began the expedition at a place called the Twilight lab, an observatory for studying the sun run by a person called Sanders located in a 5 mile wide transition between the bright and dark sides of Mercury which had hospitable temperatures for humans to survive. Over the course of their journey, tensions between them grew tense. McIver started to drive on little side trips during their daily driving in the Bug vehicles. On one of his side trips he discovered the skeletons of the last known explorers that came before them - Wyatt and Carpenter. Peter does not finish recounting his tale before the story closes, but the reader knows he never did successfully make the crossing, although he did survive (because he is presently sitting in the bar with Baron and recalling this tale from the past). It is revealed that Peter’s expedition party went beyond the farthest known point explored by humans (due to finding the bodies), and that he thinks a couple of mistakes were made in equipment choices and in not having a person driving several miles ahead to scout the terrain before the entire convoy had to drive through it.

49165

Brightside Crossing by Alan E. Nourse JAMES BARON was not pleased to hear that he had had a visitor when he reached the Red Lion that evening. He had no stomach for mysteries, vast or trifling, and there were pressing things to think about at this time. Yet the doorman had flagged him as he came in from the street: “A thousand pardons, Mr. Baron. The gentleman—he would leave no name. He said you’d want to see him. He will be back by eight.” Now Baron drummed his fingers on the table top, staring about the quiet lounge. Street trade was discouraged at the Red Lion, gently but persuasively; the patrons were few in number. Across to the right was a group that Baron knew vaguely—Andean climbers, or at least two of them were. Over near the door he recognized old Balmer, who had mapped the first passage to the core of Vulcan Crater on Venus. Baron returned his smile with a nod. Then he settled back and waited impatiently for the intruder who demanded his time without justifying it. Presently a small, grizzled man crossed the room and sat down at Baron’s table. He was short and wiry. His face held no key to his age—he might have been thirty or a thousand—but he looked weary and immensely ugly. His cheeks and forehead were twisted and brown, with scars that were still healing. The stranger said, “I’m glad you waited. I’ve heard you’re planning to attempt the Brightside.” Baron stared at the man for a moment. “I see you can read telecasts,” he said coldly. “The news was correct. We are going to make a Brightside Crossing.” “At perihelion?” “Of course. When else?” The grizzled man searched Baron’s face for a moment without expression. Then he said slowly, “No, I’m afraid you’re not going to make the Crossing.” “Say, who are you, if you don’t mind?” Baron demanded. “The name is Claney,” said the stranger. There was a silence. Then: “Claney? Peter Claney?” “That’s right.” Baron’s eyes were wide with excitement, all trace of anger gone. “Great balls of fire, man— where have you been hiding? We’ve been trying to contact you for months!” “I know. I was hoping you’d quit looking and chuck the whole idea.” “Quit looking!” Baron bent forward over the table. “My friend, we’d given up hope, but we’ve never quit looking. Here, have a drink. There’s so much you can tell us.” His fingers were trembling. Peter Claney shook his head. “I can’t tell you anything you want to hear.” “But you’ve got to. You’re the only man on Earth who’s attempted a Brightside Crossing and lived through it! And the story you cleared for the news—it was nothing. We need details . Where did your equipment fall down? Where did you miscalculate? What were the trouble spots?” Baron jabbed a finger at Claney’s face. “That, for instance—epithelioma? Why? What was wrong with your glass? Your filters? We’ve got to know those things. If you can tell us, we can make it across where your attempt failed—” “You want to know why we failed?” asked Claney. “Of course we want to know. We have to know.” “It’s simple. We failed because it can’t be done. We couldn’t do it and neither can you. No human beings will ever cross the Brightside alive, not if they try for centuries.” “Nonsense,” Baron declared. “We will.” Claney shrugged. “I was there. I know what I’m saying. You can blame the equipment or the men—there were flaws in both quarters—but we just didn’t know what we were fighting. It was the planet that whipped us, that and the Sun . They’ll whip you, too, if you try it.” “Never,” said Baron. “Let me tell you,” Peter Claney said. I’d been interested in the Brightside for almost as long as I can remember (Claney said). I guess I was about ten when Wyatt and Carpenter made the last attempt—that was in 2082, I think. I followed the news stories like a tri-V serial and then I was heartbroken when they just disappeared. I know now that they were a pair of idiots, starting off without proper equipment, with practically no knowledge of surface conditions, without any charts—they couldn’t have made a hundred miles—but I didn’t know that then and it was a terrible tragedy. After that, I followed Sanderson’s work in the Twilight Lab up there and began to get Brightside into my blood, sure as death. But it was Mikuta’s idea to attempt a Crossing. Did you ever know Tom Mikuta? I don’t suppose you did. No, not Japanese—Polish-American. He was a major in the Interplanetary Service for some years and hung onto the title after he gave up his commission. He was with Armstrong on Mars during his Service days, did a good deal of the original mapping and surveying for the Colony there. I first met him on Venus; we spent five years together up there doing some of the nastiest exploring since the Matto Grasso. Then he made the attempt on Vulcan Crater that paved the way for Balmer a few years later. I’d always liked the Major—he was big and quiet and cool, the sort of guy who always had things figured a little further ahead than anyone else and always knew what to do in a tight place. Too many men in this game are all nerve and luck, with no judgment. The Major had both. He also had the kind of personality that could take a crew of wild men and make them work like a well-oiled machine across a thousand miles of Venus jungle. I liked him and I trusted him. He contacted me in New York and he was very casual at first. We spent an evening here at the Red Lion, talking about old times; he told me about the Vulcan business, and how he’d been out to see Sanderson and the Twilight Lab on Mercury, and how he preferred a hot trek to a cold one any day of the year—and then he wanted to know what I’d been doing since Venus and what my plans were. “No particular plans,” I told him. “Why?” He looked me over. “How much do you weigh, Peter?” I told him one-thirty-five. “That much!” he said. “Well, there can’t be much fat on you, at any rate. How do you take heat?” “You should know,” I said. “Venus was no icebox.” “No, I mean real heat.” Then I began to get it. “You’re planning a trip.” “That’s right. A hot trip.” He grinned at me. “Might be dangerous, too.” “What trip?” “Brightside of Mercury,” the Major said. I whistled cautiously. “At aphelion?” He threw his head back. “Why try a Crossing at aphelion? What have you done then? Four thousand miles of butcherous heat, just to have some joker come along, use your data and drum you out of the glory by crossing at perihelion forty-four days later? No, thanks. I want the Brightside without any nonsense about it.” He leaned across me eagerly. “I want to make a Crossing at perihelion and I want to cross on the surface. If a man can do that, he’s got Mercury. Until then, nobody’s got Mercury. I want Mercury—but I’ll need help getting it.” I’d thought of it a thousand times and never dared consider it. Nobody had, since Wyatt and Carpenter disappeared. Mercury turns on its axis in the same time that it wheels around the Sun, which means that the Brightside is always facing in. That makes the Brightside of Mercury at perihelion the hottest place in the Solar System, with one single exception: the surface of the Sun itself. It would be a hellish trek. Only a few men had ever learned just how hellish and they never came back to tell about it. It was a real hell’s Crossing, but someday, I thought, somebody would cross it. I wanted to be along. The Twilight Lab, near the northern pole of Mercury, was the obvious jumping-off place. The setup there wasn’t very extensive—a rocket landing, the labs and quarters for Sanderson’s crew sunk deep into the crust, and the tower that housed the Solar ’scope that Sanderson had built up there ten years before. Twilight Lab wasn’t particularly interested in the Brightside, of course—the Sun was Sanderson’s baby and he’d picked Mercury as the closest chunk of rock to the Sun that could hold his observatory. He’d chosen a good location, too. On Mercury, the Brightside temperature hits 770° F. at perihelion and the Darkside runs pretty constant at -410° F. No permanent installation with a human crew could survive at either extreme. But with Mercury’s wobble, the twilight zone between Brightside and Darkside offers something closer to survival temperatures. Sanderson built the Lab up near the pole, where the zone is about five miles wide, so the temperature only varies 50 to 60 degrees with the libration. The Solar ’scope could take that much change and they’d get good clear observation of the Sun for about seventy out of the eighty-eight days it takes the planet to wheel around. The Major was counting on Sanderson knowing something about Mercury as well as the Sun when we camped at the Lab to make final preparations. Sanderson did. He thought we’d lost our minds and he said so, but he gave us all the help he could. He spent a week briefing Jack Stone, the third member of our party, who had arrived with the supplies and equipment a few days earlier. Poor Jack met us at the rocket landing almost bawling, Sanderson had given him such a gloomy picture of what Brightside was like. Stone was a youngster—hardly twenty-five, I’d say—but he’d been with the Major at Vulcan and had begged to join this trek. I had a funny feeling that Jack really didn’t care for exploring too much, but he thought Mikuta was God, followed him around like a puppy. It didn’t matter to me as long as he knew what he was getting in for. You don’t go asking people in this game why they do it—they’re liable to get awfully uneasy and none of them can ever give you an answer that makes sense. Anyway, Stone had borrowed three men from the Lab, and had the supplies and equipment all lined up when we got there, ready to check and test. We dug right in. With plenty of funds—tri-V money and some government cash the Major had talked his way around—our equipment was new and good. Mikuta had done the designing and testing himself, with a big assist from Sanderson. We had four Bugs, three of them the light pillow-tire models, with special lead-cooled cut-in engines when the heat set in, and one heavy-duty tractor model for pulling the sledges. The Major went over them like a kid at the circus. Then he said, “Have you heard anything from McIvers?” “Who’s he?” Stone wanted to know. “He’ll be joining us. He’s a good man—got quite a name for climbing, back home.” The Major turned to me. “You’ve probably heard of him.” I’d heard plenty of stories about Ted McIvers and I wasn’t too happy to hear that he was joining us. “Kind of a daredevil, isn’t he?” “Maybe. He’s lucky and skillful. Where do you draw the line? We’ll need plenty of both.” “Have you ever worked with him?” I asked. “No. Are you worried?” “Not exactly. But Brightside is no place to count on luck.” The Major laughed. “I don’t think we need to worry about McIvers. We understood each other when I talked up the trip to him and we’re going to need each other too much to do any fooling around.” He turned back to the supply list. “Meanwhile, let’s get this stuff listed and packed. We’ll need to cut weight sharply and our time is short. Sanderson says we should leave in three days.” Two days later, McIvers hadn’t arrived. The Major didn’t say much about it. Stone was getting edgy and so was I. We spent the second day studying charts of the Brightside, such as they were. The best available were pretty poor, taken from so far out that the detail dissolved into blurs on blow-up. They showed the biggest ranges of peaks and craters and faults, and that was all. Still, we could use them to plan a broad outline of our course. “This range here,” the Major said as we crowded around the board, “is largely inactive, according to Sanderson. But these to the south and west could be active. Seismograph tracings suggest a lot of activity in that region, getting worse down toward the equator—not only volcanic, but sub-surface shifting.” Stone nodded. “Sanderson told me there was probably constant surface activity.” The Major shrugged. “Well, it’s treacherous, there’s no doubt of it. But the only way to avoid it is to travel over the Pole, which would lose us days and offer us no guarantee of less activity to the west. Now we might avoid some if we could find a pass through this range and cut sharp east—” It seemed that the more we considered the problem, the further we got from a solution. We knew there were active volcanoes on the Brightside—even on the Darkside, though surface activity there was pretty much slowed down and localized. But there were problems of atmosphere on Brightside, as well. There was an atmosphere and a constant atmospheric flow from Brightside to Darkside. Not much—the lighter gases had reached escape velocity and disappeared from Brightside millennia ago—but there was CO 2 , and nitrogen, and traces of other heavier gases. There was also an abundance of sulfur vapor, as well as carbon disulfide and sulfur dioxide. The atmospheric tide moved toward the Darkside, where it condensed, carrying enough volcanic ash with it for Sanderson to estimate the depth and nature of the surface upheavals on Brightside from his samplings. The trick was to find a passage that avoided those upheavals as far as possible. But in the final analysis, we were barely scraping the surface. The only way we would find out what was happening where was to be there. Finally, on the third day, McIvers blew in on a freight rocket from Venus. He’d missed the ship that the Major and I had taken by a few hours, and had conned his way to Venus in hopes of getting a hop from there. He didn’t seem too upset about it, as though this were his usual way of doing things and he couldn’t see why everyone should get so excited. He was a tall, rangy man with long, wavy hair prematurely gray, and the sort of eyes that looked like a climber’s—half-closed, sleepy, almost indolent, but capable of abrupt alertness. And he never stood still; he was always moving, always doing something with his hands, or talking, or pacing about. Evidently the Major decided not to press the issue of his arrival. There was still work to do, and an hour later we were running the final tests on the pressure suits. That evening, Stone and McIvers were thick as thieves, and everything was set for an early departure after we got some rest. “And that,” said Baron, finishing his drink and signaling the waiter for another pair, “was your first big mistake.” Peter Claney raised his eyebrows. “McIvers?” “Of course.” Claney shrugged, glanced at the small quiet tables around them. “There are lots of bizarre personalities around a place like this, and some of the best wouldn’t seem to be the most reliable at first glance. Anyway, personality problems weren’t our big problem right then. Equipment worried us first and route next.” Baron nodded in agreement. “What kind of suits did you have?” “The best insulating suits ever made,” said Claney. “Each one had an inner lining of a fiberglass modification, to avoid the clumsiness of asbestos, and carried the refrigerating unit and oxygen storage which we recharged from the sledges every eight hours. Outer layer carried a monomolecular chrome reflecting surface that made us glitter like Christmas trees. And we had a half-inch dead-air space under positive pressure between the two layers. Warning thermocouples, of course—at 770 degrees, it wouldn’t take much time to fry us to cinders if the suits failed somewhere.” “How about the Bugs?” “They were insulated, too, but we weren’t counting on them too much for protection.” “You weren’t!” Baron exclaimed. “Why not?” “We’d be in and out of them too much. They gave us mobility and storage, but we knew we’d have to do a lot of forward work on foot.” Claney smiled bitterly. “Which meant that we had an inch of fiberglass and a half-inch of dead air between us and a surface temperature where lead flowed like water and zinc was almost at melting point and the pools of sulfur in the shadows were boiling like oatmeal over a campfire.” Baron licked his lips. His fingers stroked the cool, wet glass as he set it down on the tablecloth. “Go on,” he said tautly. “You started on schedule?” “Oh, yes,” said Claney, “we started on schedule, all right. We just didn’t quite end on schedule, that was all. But I’m getting to that.” He settled back in his chair and continued. We jumped off from Twilight on a course due southeast with thirty days to make it to the Center of Brightside. If we could cross an average of seventy miles a day, we could hit Center exactly at perihelion, the point of Mercury’s closest approach to the Sun—which made Center the hottest part of the planet at the hottest it ever gets. The Sun was already huge and yellow over the horizon when we started, twice the size it appears on Earth. Every day that Sun would grow bigger and whiter, and every day the surface would get hotter. But once we reached Center, the job was only half done—we would still have to travel another two thousand miles to the opposite twilight zone. Sanderson was to meet us on the other side in the Laboratory’s scout ship, approximately sixty days from the time we jumped off. That was the plan, in outline. It was up to us to cross those seventy miles a day, no matter how hot it became, no matter what terrain we had to cross. Detours would be dangerous and time-consuming. Delays could cost us our lives. We all knew that. The Major briefed us on details an hour before we left. “Peter, you’ll take the lead Bug, the small one we stripped down for you. Stone and I will flank you on either side, giving you a hundred-yard lead. McIvers, you’ll have the job of dragging the sledges, so we’ll have to direct your course pretty closely. Peter’s job is to pick the passage at any given point. If there’s any doubt of safe passage, we’ll all explore ahead on foot before we risk the Bugs. Got that?” McIvers and Stone exchanged glances. McIvers said: “Jack and I were planning to change around. We figured he could take the sledges. That would give me a little more mobility.” The Major looked up sharply at Stone. “Do you buy that, Jack?” Stone shrugged. “I don’t mind. Mac wanted—” McIvers made an impatient gesture with his hands. “It doesn’t matter. I just feel better when I’m on the move. Does it make any difference?” “I guess it doesn’t,” said the Major. “Then you’ll flank Peter along with me. Right?” “Sure, sure.” McIvers pulled at his lower lip. “Who’s going to do the advance scouting?” “It sounds like I am,” I cut in. “We want to keep the lead Bug light as possible.” Mikuta nodded. “That’s right. Peter’s Bug is stripped down to the frame and wheels.” McIvers shook his head. “No, I mean the advance work. You need somebody out ahead—four or five miles, at least—to pick up the big flaws and active surface changes, don’t you?” He stared at the Major. “I mean, how can we tell what sort of a hole we may be moving into, unless we have a scout up ahead?” “That’s what we have the charts for,” the Major said sharply. “Charts! I’m talking about detail work. We don’t need to worry about the major topography. It’s the little faults you can’t see on the pictures that can kill us.” He tossed the charts down excitedly. “Look, let me take a Bug out ahead and work reconnaissance, keep five, maybe ten miles ahead of the column. I can stay on good solid ground, of course, but scan the area closely and radio back to Peter where to avoid the flaws. Then—” “No dice,” the Major broke in. “But why not? We could save ourselves days!” “I don’t care what we could save. We stay together. When we get to the Center, I want live men along with me. That means we stay within easy sight of each other at all times. Any climber knows that everybody is safer in a party than one man alone—any time, any place.” McIvers stared at him, his cheeks an angry red. Finally he gave a sullen nod. “Okay. If you say so.” “Well, I say so and I mean it. I don’t want any fancy stuff. We’re going to hit Center together, and finish the Crossing together. Got that?” McIvers nodded. Mikuta then looked at Stone and me and we nodded, too. “All right,” he said slowly. “Now that we’ve got it straight, let’s go.” It was hot. If I forget everything else about that trek, I’ll never forget that huge yellow Sun glaring down, without a break, hotter and hotter with every mile. We knew that the first few days would be the easiest and we were rested and fresh when we started down the long ragged gorge southeast of the Twilight Lab. I moved out first; back over my shoulder, I could see the Major and McIvers crawling out behind me, their pillow tires taking the rugged floor of the gorge smoothly. Behind them, Stone dragged the sledges. Even at only 30 per cent Earth gravity they were a strain on the big tractor, until the ski-blades bit into the fluffy volcanic ash blanketing the valley. We even had a path to follow for the first twenty miles. I kept my eyes pasted to the big polaroid binocs, picking out the track the early research teams had made out into the edge of Brightside. But in a couple of hours we rumbled past Sanderson’s little outpost observatory and the tracks stopped. We were in virgin territory and already the Sun was beginning to bite. We didn’t feel the heat so much those first days out. We saw it. The refrig units kept our skins at a nice comfortable seventy-five degrees Fahrenheit inside our suits, but our eyes watched that glaring Sun and the baked yellow rocks going past, and some nerve pathways got twisted up, somehow. We poured sweat as if we were in a superheated furnace. We drove eight hours and slept five. When a sleep period came due, we pulled the Bugs together into a square, threw up a light aluminum sun-shield and lay out in the dust and rocks. The sun-shield cut the temperature down sixty or seventy degrees, for whatever help that was. And then we ate from the forward sledge—sucking through tubes—protein, carbohydrates, bulk gelatin, vitamins. The Major measured water out with an iron hand, because we’d have drunk ourselves into nephritis in a week otherwise. We were constantly, unceasingly thirsty. Ask the physiologists and psychiatrists why—they can give you have a dozen interesting reasons—but all we knew, or cared about, was that it happened to be so. We didn’t sleep the first few stops, as a consequence. Our eyes burned in spite of the filters and we had roaring headaches, but we couldn’t sleep them off. We sat around looking at each other. Then McIvers would say how good a beer would taste, and off we’d go. We’d have murdered our grandmothers for one ice-cold bottle of beer. After a few driving periods, I began to get my bearings at the wheel. We were moving down into desolation that made Earth’s old Death Valley look like a Japanese rose garden. Huge sun-baked cracks opened up in the floor of the gorge, with black cliffs jutting up on either side; the air was filled with a barely visible yellowish mist of sulfur and sulfurous gases. It was a hot, barren hole, no place for any man to go, but the challenge was so powerful you could almost feel it. No one had ever crossed this land before and escaped. Those who had tried it had been cruelly punished, but the land was still there, so it had to be crossed. Not the easy way. It had to be crossed the hardest way possible: overland, through anything the land could throw up to us, at the most difficult time possible. Yet we knew that even the land might have been conquered before, except for that Sun. We’d fought absolute cold before and won. We’d never fought heat like this and won. The only worse heat in the Solar System was the surface of the Sun itself. Brightside was worth trying for. We would get it or it would get us. That was the bargain. I learned a lot about Mercury those first few driving periods. The gorge petered out after a hundred miles and we moved onto the slope of a range of ragged craters that ran south and east. This range had shown no activity since the first landing on Mercury forty years before, but beyond it there were active cones. Yellow fumes rose from the craters constantly; their sides were shrouded with heavy ash. We couldn’t detect a wind, but we knew there was a hot, sulfurous breeze sweeping in great continental tides across the face of the planet. Not enough for erosion, though. The craters rose up out of jagged gorges, huge towering spears of rock and rubble. Below were the vast yellow flatlands, smoking and hissing from the gases beneath the crust. Over everything was gray dust—silicates and salts, pumice and limestone and granite ash, filling crevices and declivities—offering a soft, treacherous surface for the Bug’s pillow tires. I learned to read the ground, to tell a covered fault by the sag of the dust; I learned to spot a passable crack, and tell it from an impassable cut. Time after time the Bugs ground to a halt while we explored a passage on foot, tied together with light copper cable, digging, advancing, digging some more until we were sure the surface would carry the machines. It was cruel work; we slept in exhaustion. But it went smoothly, at first. Too smoothly, it seemed to me, and the others seemed to think so, too. McIvers’ restlessness was beginning to grate on our nerves. He talked too much, while we were resting or while we were driving; wisecracks, witticisms, unfunny jokes that wore thin with repetition. He took to making side trips from the route now and then, never far, but a little further each time. Jack Stone reacted quite the opposite; he grew quieter with each stop, more reserved and apprehensive. I didn’t like it, but I figured that it would pass off after a while. I was apprehensive enough myself; I just managed to hide it better. And every mile the Sun got bigger and whiter and higher in the sky and hotter. Without our ultra-violet screens and glare filters we would have been blinded; as it was our eyes ached constantly and the skin on our faces itched and tingled at the end of an eight-hour trek. But it took one of those side trips of McIvers’ to deliver the penultimate blow to our already fraying nerves. He had driven down a side-branch of a long canyon running off west of our route and was almost out of sight in a cloud of ash when we heard a sharp cry through our earphones. I wheeled my Bug around with my heart in my throat and spotted him through the binocs, waving frantically from the top of his machine. The Major and I took off, lumbering down the gulch after him as fast as the Bugs could go, with a thousand horrible pictures racing through our minds.... We found him standing stock-still, pointing down the gorge and, for once, he didn’t have anything to say. It was the wreck of a Bug; an old-fashioned half-track model of the sort that hadn’t been in use for years. It was wedged tight in a cut in the rock, an axle broken, its casing split wide open up the middle, half-buried in a rock slide. A dozen feet away were two insulated suits with white bones gleaming through the fiberglass helmets. This was as far as Wyatt and Carpenter had gotten on their Brightside Crossing. On the fifth driving period out, the terrain began to change. It looked the same, but every now and then it felt different. On two occasions I felt my wheels spin, with a howl of protest from my engine. Then, quite suddenly, the Bug gave a lurch; I gunned my motor and nothing happened. I could see the dull gray stuff seeping up around the hubs, thick and tenacious, splattering around in steaming gobs as the wheels spun. I knew what had happened the moment the wheels gave and, a few minutes later, they chained me to the tractor and dragged me back out of the mire. It looked for all the world like thick gray mud, but it was a pit of molten lead, steaming under a soft layer of concealing ash. I picked my way more cautiously then. We were getting into an area of recent surface activity; the surface was really treacherous. I caught myself wishing that the Major had okayed McIvers’ scheme for an advanced scout; more dangerous for the individual, maybe, but I was driving blind now and I didn’t like it. One error in judgment could sink us all, but I wasn’t thinking much about the others. I was worried about me , plenty worried. I kept thinking, better McIvers should go than me. It wasn’t healthy thinking and I knew it, but I couldn’t get the thought out of my mind. It was a grueling eight hours and we slept poorly. Back in the Bug again, we moved still more slowly—edging out on a broad flat plateau, dodging a network of gaping surface cracks—winding back and forth in an effort to keep the machines on solid rock. I couldn’t see far ahead, because of the yellow haze rising from the cracks, so I was almost on top of it when I saw a sharp cut ahead where the surface dropped six feet beyond a deep crack. I let out a shout to halt the others; then I edged my Bug forward, peering at the cleft. It was deep and wide. I moved fifty yards to the left, then back to the right. There was only one place that looked like a possible crossing; a long, narrow ledge of gray stuff that lay down across a section of the fault like a ramp. Even as I watched it, I could feel the surface crust under the Bug trembling and saw the ledge shift over a few feet.

What is the plot of the story?

9

An explorer named James Baron waits irritatedly for a stranger in the Red Lion, a bar in New York. The stranger turns out to be another explorer, Peter Claney, whom Baron has been attempting to contact to get the details of Claney’s previous mission to Mercury’s Brightside, as he is the only man on Earth to have survived and attempt to cross the Brightside, and Baron plans to attempt it soon himself. Claney says it can’t be done, and that he’ll tell Baron his story to prove it to him. The rest of the passage takes place within Claney’s story. Claney tells of his desire since childhood to attempt the journey, and how he met Major Mikuta, who wants to attempt it. Claney joins Mikuta, along with a young acolyte of the Major’s, Jack Stone, and an impetuous, thrill-seeking climber named Ted McIvers. The addition of McIvers to the team is an unwelcome surprise to Claney, and he proves to be headstrong and restless. The team plans and strategizes at Twilight Lab at Mercury’s north pole. They set out on their journey with Claney out front and in charge of finding safe passage routes, Mikuta and McIvers flanking him on either side, and Stone pulling the sledges in the rear. They were state-of-the-art protective equipment and travel in “bug” vehicles, but the terrain and atmosphere are treacherous. They grow more anxious as they go, with McIvers driving the rest of the crew nuts with his constant talking and wandering, and Stone growing more quiet and reserved. Their nerves are further troubled by the discovery of two previous explorers’ corpses (the two explorers Claney had mentioned looking up to as a kid). As the passage ends, Claney is in a precarious position at the edge of a chasm with only a thin, ramp-like surface that is already shifting as he watches and ponders how they’ll cross.

49165

Brightside Crossing by Alan E. Nourse JAMES BARON was not pleased to hear that he had had a visitor when he reached the Red Lion that evening. He had no stomach for mysteries, vast or trifling, and there were pressing things to think about at this time. Yet the doorman had flagged him as he came in from the street: “A thousand pardons, Mr. Baron. The gentleman—he would leave no name. He said you’d want to see him. He will be back by eight.” Now Baron drummed his fingers on the table top, staring about the quiet lounge. Street trade was discouraged at the Red Lion, gently but persuasively; the patrons were few in number. Across to the right was a group that Baron knew vaguely—Andean climbers, or at least two of them were. Over near the door he recognized old Balmer, who had mapped the first passage to the core of Vulcan Crater on Venus. Baron returned his smile with a nod. Then he settled back and waited impatiently for the intruder who demanded his time without justifying it. Presently a small, grizzled man crossed the room and sat down at Baron’s table. He was short and wiry. His face held no key to his age—he might have been thirty or a thousand—but he looked weary and immensely ugly. His cheeks and forehead were twisted and brown, with scars that were still healing. The stranger said, “I’m glad you waited. I’ve heard you’re planning to attempt the Brightside.” Baron stared at the man for a moment. “I see you can read telecasts,” he said coldly. “The news was correct. We are going to make a Brightside Crossing.” “At perihelion?” “Of course. When else?” The grizzled man searched Baron’s face for a moment without expression. Then he said slowly, “No, I’m afraid you’re not going to make the Crossing.” “Say, who are you, if you don’t mind?” Baron demanded. “The name is Claney,” said the stranger. There was a silence. Then: “Claney? Peter Claney?” “That’s right.” Baron’s eyes were wide with excitement, all trace of anger gone. “Great balls of fire, man— where have you been hiding? We’ve been trying to contact you for months!” “I know. I was hoping you’d quit looking and chuck the whole idea.” “Quit looking!” Baron bent forward over the table. “My friend, we’d given up hope, but we’ve never quit looking. Here, have a drink. There’s so much you can tell us.” His fingers were trembling. Peter Claney shook his head. “I can’t tell you anything you want to hear.” “But you’ve got to. You’re the only man on Earth who’s attempted a Brightside Crossing and lived through it! And the story you cleared for the news—it was nothing. We need details . Where did your equipment fall down? Where did you miscalculate? What were the trouble spots?” Baron jabbed a finger at Claney’s face. “That, for instance—epithelioma? Why? What was wrong with your glass? Your filters? We’ve got to know those things. If you can tell us, we can make it across where your attempt failed—” “You want to know why we failed?” asked Claney. “Of course we want to know. We have to know.” “It’s simple. We failed because it can’t be done. We couldn’t do it and neither can you. No human beings will ever cross the Brightside alive, not if they try for centuries.” “Nonsense,” Baron declared. “We will.” Claney shrugged. “I was there. I know what I’m saying. You can blame the equipment or the men—there were flaws in both quarters—but we just didn’t know what we were fighting. It was the planet that whipped us, that and the Sun . They’ll whip you, too, if you try it.” “Never,” said Baron. “Let me tell you,” Peter Claney said. I’d been interested in the Brightside for almost as long as I can remember (Claney said). I guess I was about ten when Wyatt and Carpenter made the last attempt—that was in 2082, I think. I followed the news stories like a tri-V serial and then I was heartbroken when they just disappeared. I know now that they were a pair of idiots, starting off without proper equipment, with practically no knowledge of surface conditions, without any charts—they couldn’t have made a hundred miles—but I didn’t know that then and it was a terrible tragedy. After that, I followed Sanderson’s work in the Twilight Lab up there and began to get Brightside into my blood, sure as death. But it was Mikuta’s idea to attempt a Crossing. Did you ever know Tom Mikuta? I don’t suppose you did. No, not Japanese—Polish-American. He was a major in the Interplanetary Service for some years and hung onto the title after he gave up his commission. He was with Armstrong on Mars during his Service days, did a good deal of the original mapping and surveying for the Colony there. I first met him on Venus; we spent five years together up there doing some of the nastiest exploring since the Matto Grasso. Then he made the attempt on Vulcan Crater that paved the way for Balmer a few years later. I’d always liked the Major—he was big and quiet and cool, the sort of guy who always had things figured a little further ahead than anyone else and always knew what to do in a tight place. Too many men in this game are all nerve and luck, with no judgment. The Major had both. He also had the kind of personality that could take a crew of wild men and make them work like a well-oiled machine across a thousand miles of Venus jungle. I liked him and I trusted him. He contacted me in New York and he was very casual at first. We spent an evening here at the Red Lion, talking about old times; he told me about the Vulcan business, and how he’d been out to see Sanderson and the Twilight Lab on Mercury, and how he preferred a hot trek to a cold one any day of the year—and then he wanted to know what I’d been doing since Venus and what my plans were. “No particular plans,” I told him. “Why?” He looked me over. “How much do you weigh, Peter?” I told him one-thirty-five. “That much!” he said. “Well, there can’t be much fat on you, at any rate. How do you take heat?” “You should know,” I said. “Venus was no icebox.” “No, I mean real heat.” Then I began to get it. “You’re planning a trip.” “That’s right. A hot trip.” He grinned at me. “Might be dangerous, too.” “What trip?” “Brightside of Mercury,” the Major said. I whistled cautiously. “At aphelion?” He threw his head back. “Why try a Crossing at aphelion? What have you done then? Four thousand miles of butcherous heat, just to have some joker come along, use your data and drum you out of the glory by crossing at perihelion forty-four days later? No, thanks. I want the Brightside without any nonsense about it.” He leaned across me eagerly. “I want to make a Crossing at perihelion and I want to cross on the surface. If a man can do that, he’s got Mercury. Until then, nobody’s got Mercury. I want Mercury—but I’ll need help getting it.” I’d thought of it a thousand times and never dared consider it. Nobody had, since Wyatt and Carpenter disappeared. Mercury turns on its axis in the same time that it wheels around the Sun, which means that the Brightside is always facing in. That makes the Brightside of Mercury at perihelion the hottest place in the Solar System, with one single exception: the surface of the Sun itself. It would be a hellish trek. Only a few men had ever learned just how hellish and they never came back to tell about it. It was a real hell’s Crossing, but someday, I thought, somebody would cross it. I wanted to be along. The Twilight Lab, near the northern pole of Mercury, was the obvious jumping-off place. The setup there wasn’t very extensive—a rocket landing, the labs and quarters for Sanderson’s crew sunk deep into the crust, and the tower that housed the Solar ’scope that Sanderson had built up there ten years before. Twilight Lab wasn’t particularly interested in the Brightside, of course—the Sun was Sanderson’s baby and he’d picked Mercury as the closest chunk of rock to the Sun that could hold his observatory. He’d chosen a good location, too. On Mercury, the Brightside temperature hits 770° F. at perihelion and the Darkside runs pretty constant at -410° F. No permanent installation with a human crew could survive at either extreme. But with Mercury’s wobble, the twilight zone between Brightside and Darkside offers something closer to survival temperatures. Sanderson built the Lab up near the pole, where the zone is about five miles wide, so the temperature only varies 50 to 60 degrees with the libration. The Solar ’scope could take that much change and they’d get good clear observation of the Sun for about seventy out of the eighty-eight days it takes the planet to wheel around. The Major was counting on Sanderson knowing something about Mercury as well as the Sun when we camped at the Lab to make final preparations. Sanderson did. He thought we’d lost our minds and he said so, but he gave us all the help he could. He spent a week briefing Jack Stone, the third member of our party, who had arrived with the supplies and equipment a few days earlier. Poor Jack met us at the rocket landing almost bawling, Sanderson had given him such a gloomy picture of what Brightside was like. Stone was a youngster—hardly twenty-five, I’d say—but he’d been with the Major at Vulcan and had begged to join this trek. I had a funny feeling that Jack really didn’t care for exploring too much, but he thought Mikuta was God, followed him around like a puppy. It didn’t matter to me as long as he knew what he was getting in for. You don’t go asking people in this game why they do it—they’re liable to get awfully uneasy and none of them can ever give you an answer that makes sense. Anyway, Stone had borrowed three men from the Lab, and had the supplies and equipment all lined up when we got there, ready to check and test. We dug right in. With plenty of funds—tri-V money and some government cash the Major had talked his way around—our equipment was new and good. Mikuta had done the designing and testing himself, with a big assist from Sanderson. We had four Bugs, three of them the light pillow-tire models, with special lead-cooled cut-in engines when the heat set in, and one heavy-duty tractor model for pulling the sledges. The Major went over them like a kid at the circus. Then he said, “Have you heard anything from McIvers?” “Who’s he?” Stone wanted to know. “He’ll be joining us. He’s a good man—got quite a name for climbing, back home.” The Major turned to me. “You’ve probably heard of him.” I’d heard plenty of stories about Ted McIvers and I wasn’t too happy to hear that he was joining us. “Kind of a daredevil, isn’t he?” “Maybe. He’s lucky and skillful. Where do you draw the line? We’ll need plenty of both.” “Have you ever worked with him?” I asked. “No. Are you worried?” “Not exactly. But Brightside is no place to count on luck.” The Major laughed. “I don’t think we need to worry about McIvers. We understood each other when I talked up the trip to him and we’re going to need each other too much to do any fooling around.” He turned back to the supply list. “Meanwhile, let’s get this stuff listed and packed. We’ll need to cut weight sharply and our time is short. Sanderson says we should leave in three days.” Two days later, McIvers hadn’t arrived. The Major didn’t say much about it. Stone was getting edgy and so was I. We spent the second day studying charts of the Brightside, such as they were. The best available were pretty poor, taken from so far out that the detail dissolved into blurs on blow-up. They showed the biggest ranges of peaks and craters and faults, and that was all. Still, we could use them to plan a broad outline of our course. “This range here,” the Major said as we crowded around the board, “is largely inactive, according to Sanderson. But these to the south and west could be active. Seismograph tracings suggest a lot of activity in that region, getting worse down toward the equator—not only volcanic, but sub-surface shifting.” Stone nodded. “Sanderson told me there was probably constant surface activity.” The Major shrugged. “Well, it’s treacherous, there’s no doubt of it. But the only way to avoid it is to travel over the Pole, which would lose us days and offer us no guarantee of less activity to the west. Now we might avoid some if we could find a pass through this range and cut sharp east—” It seemed that the more we considered the problem, the further we got from a solution. We knew there were active volcanoes on the Brightside—even on the Darkside, though surface activity there was pretty much slowed down and localized. But there were problems of atmosphere on Brightside, as well. There was an atmosphere and a constant atmospheric flow from Brightside to Darkside. Not much—the lighter gases had reached escape velocity and disappeared from Brightside millennia ago—but there was CO 2 , and nitrogen, and traces of other heavier gases. There was also an abundance of sulfur vapor, as well as carbon disulfide and sulfur dioxide. The atmospheric tide moved toward the Darkside, where it condensed, carrying enough volcanic ash with it for Sanderson to estimate the depth and nature of the surface upheavals on Brightside from his samplings. The trick was to find a passage that avoided those upheavals as far as possible. But in the final analysis, we were barely scraping the surface. The only way we would find out what was happening where was to be there. Finally, on the third day, McIvers blew in on a freight rocket from Venus. He’d missed the ship that the Major and I had taken by a few hours, and had conned his way to Venus in hopes of getting a hop from there. He didn’t seem too upset about it, as though this were his usual way of doing things and he couldn’t see why everyone should get so excited. He was a tall, rangy man with long, wavy hair prematurely gray, and the sort of eyes that looked like a climber’s—half-closed, sleepy, almost indolent, but capable of abrupt alertness. And he never stood still; he was always moving, always doing something with his hands, or talking, or pacing about. Evidently the Major decided not to press the issue of his arrival. There was still work to do, and an hour later we were running the final tests on the pressure suits. That evening, Stone and McIvers were thick as thieves, and everything was set for an early departure after we got some rest. “And that,” said Baron, finishing his drink and signaling the waiter for another pair, “was your first big mistake.” Peter Claney raised his eyebrows. “McIvers?” “Of course.” Claney shrugged, glanced at the small quiet tables around them. “There are lots of bizarre personalities around a place like this, and some of the best wouldn’t seem to be the most reliable at first glance. Anyway, personality problems weren’t our big problem right then. Equipment worried us first and route next.” Baron nodded in agreement. “What kind of suits did you have?” “The best insulating suits ever made,” said Claney. “Each one had an inner lining of a fiberglass modification, to avoid the clumsiness of asbestos, and carried the refrigerating unit and oxygen storage which we recharged from the sledges every eight hours. Outer layer carried a monomolecular chrome reflecting surface that made us glitter like Christmas trees. And we had a half-inch dead-air space under positive pressure between the two layers. Warning thermocouples, of course—at 770 degrees, it wouldn’t take much time to fry us to cinders if the suits failed somewhere.” “How about the Bugs?” “They were insulated, too, but we weren’t counting on them too much for protection.” “You weren’t!” Baron exclaimed. “Why not?” “We’d be in and out of them too much. They gave us mobility and storage, but we knew we’d have to do a lot of forward work on foot.” Claney smiled bitterly. “Which meant that we had an inch of fiberglass and a half-inch of dead air between us and a surface temperature where lead flowed like water and zinc was almost at melting point and the pools of sulfur in the shadows were boiling like oatmeal over a campfire.” Baron licked his lips. His fingers stroked the cool, wet glass as he set it down on the tablecloth. “Go on,” he said tautly. “You started on schedule?” “Oh, yes,” said Claney, “we started on schedule, all right. We just didn’t quite end on schedule, that was all. But I’m getting to that.” He settled back in his chair and continued. We jumped off from Twilight on a course due southeast with thirty days to make it to the Center of Brightside. If we could cross an average of seventy miles a day, we could hit Center exactly at perihelion, the point of Mercury’s closest approach to the Sun—which made Center the hottest part of the planet at the hottest it ever gets. The Sun was already huge and yellow over the horizon when we started, twice the size it appears on Earth. Every day that Sun would grow bigger and whiter, and every day the surface would get hotter. But once we reached Center, the job was only half done—we would still have to travel another two thousand miles to the opposite twilight zone. Sanderson was to meet us on the other side in the Laboratory’s scout ship, approximately sixty days from the time we jumped off. That was the plan, in outline. It was up to us to cross those seventy miles a day, no matter how hot it became, no matter what terrain we had to cross. Detours would be dangerous and time-consuming. Delays could cost us our lives. We all knew that. The Major briefed us on details an hour before we left. “Peter, you’ll take the lead Bug, the small one we stripped down for you. Stone and I will flank you on either side, giving you a hundred-yard lead. McIvers, you’ll have the job of dragging the sledges, so we’ll have to direct your course pretty closely. Peter’s job is to pick the passage at any given point. If there’s any doubt of safe passage, we’ll all explore ahead on foot before we risk the Bugs. Got that?” McIvers and Stone exchanged glances. McIvers said: “Jack and I were planning to change around. We figured he could take the sledges. That would give me a little more mobility.” The Major looked up sharply at Stone. “Do you buy that, Jack?” Stone shrugged. “I don’t mind. Mac wanted—” McIvers made an impatient gesture with his hands. “It doesn’t matter. I just feel better when I’m on the move. Does it make any difference?” “I guess it doesn’t,” said the Major. “Then you’ll flank Peter along with me. Right?” “Sure, sure.” McIvers pulled at his lower lip. “Who’s going to do the advance scouting?” “It sounds like I am,” I cut in. “We want to keep the lead Bug light as possible.” Mikuta nodded. “That’s right. Peter’s Bug is stripped down to the frame and wheels.” McIvers shook his head. “No, I mean the advance work. You need somebody out ahead—four or five miles, at least—to pick up the big flaws and active surface changes, don’t you?” He stared at the Major. “I mean, how can we tell what sort of a hole we may be moving into, unless we have a scout up ahead?” “That’s what we have the charts for,” the Major said sharply. “Charts! I’m talking about detail work. We don’t need to worry about the major topography. It’s the little faults you can’t see on the pictures that can kill us.” He tossed the charts down excitedly. “Look, let me take a Bug out ahead and work reconnaissance, keep five, maybe ten miles ahead of the column. I can stay on good solid ground, of course, but scan the area closely and radio back to Peter where to avoid the flaws. Then—” “No dice,” the Major broke in. “But why not? We could save ourselves days!” “I don’t care what we could save. We stay together. When we get to the Center, I want live men along with me. That means we stay within easy sight of each other at all times. Any climber knows that everybody is safer in a party than one man alone—any time, any place.” McIvers stared at him, his cheeks an angry red. Finally he gave a sullen nod. “Okay. If you say so.” “Well, I say so and I mean it. I don’t want any fancy stuff. We’re going to hit Center together, and finish the Crossing together. Got that?” McIvers nodded. Mikuta then looked at Stone and me and we nodded, too. “All right,” he said slowly. “Now that we’ve got it straight, let’s go.” It was hot. If I forget everything else about that trek, I’ll never forget that huge yellow Sun glaring down, without a break, hotter and hotter with every mile. We knew that the first few days would be the easiest and we were rested and fresh when we started down the long ragged gorge southeast of the Twilight Lab. I moved out first; back over my shoulder, I could see the Major and McIvers crawling out behind me, their pillow tires taking the rugged floor of the gorge smoothly. Behind them, Stone dragged the sledges. Even at only 30 per cent Earth gravity they were a strain on the big tractor, until the ski-blades bit into the fluffy volcanic ash blanketing the valley. We even had a path to follow for the first twenty miles. I kept my eyes pasted to the big polaroid binocs, picking out the track the early research teams had made out into the edge of Brightside. But in a couple of hours we rumbled past Sanderson’s little outpost observatory and the tracks stopped. We were in virgin territory and already the Sun was beginning to bite. We didn’t feel the heat so much those first days out. We saw it. The refrig units kept our skins at a nice comfortable seventy-five degrees Fahrenheit inside our suits, but our eyes watched that glaring Sun and the baked yellow rocks going past, and some nerve pathways got twisted up, somehow. We poured sweat as if we were in a superheated furnace. We drove eight hours and slept five. When a sleep period came due, we pulled the Bugs together into a square, threw up a light aluminum sun-shield and lay out in the dust and rocks. The sun-shield cut the temperature down sixty or seventy degrees, for whatever help that was. And then we ate from the forward sledge—sucking through tubes—protein, carbohydrates, bulk gelatin, vitamins. The Major measured water out with an iron hand, because we’d have drunk ourselves into nephritis in a week otherwise. We were constantly, unceasingly thirsty. Ask the physiologists and psychiatrists why—they can give you have a dozen interesting reasons—but all we knew, or cared about, was that it happened to be so. We didn’t sleep the first few stops, as a consequence. Our eyes burned in spite of the filters and we had roaring headaches, but we couldn’t sleep them off. We sat around looking at each other. Then McIvers would say how good a beer would taste, and off we’d go. We’d have murdered our grandmothers for one ice-cold bottle of beer. After a few driving periods, I began to get my bearings at the wheel. We were moving down into desolation that made Earth’s old Death Valley look like a Japanese rose garden. Huge sun-baked cracks opened up in the floor of the gorge, with black cliffs jutting up on either side; the air was filled with a barely visible yellowish mist of sulfur and sulfurous gases. It was a hot, barren hole, no place for any man to go, but the challenge was so powerful you could almost feel it. No one had ever crossed this land before and escaped. Those who had tried it had been cruelly punished, but the land was still there, so it had to be crossed. Not the easy way. It had to be crossed the hardest way possible: overland, through anything the land could throw up to us, at the most difficult time possible. Yet we knew that even the land might have been conquered before, except for that Sun. We’d fought absolute cold before and won. We’d never fought heat like this and won. The only worse heat in the Solar System was the surface of the Sun itself. Brightside was worth trying for. We would get it or it would get us. That was the bargain. I learned a lot about Mercury those first few driving periods. The gorge petered out after a hundred miles and we moved onto the slope of a range of ragged craters that ran south and east. This range had shown no activity since the first landing on Mercury forty years before, but beyond it there were active cones. Yellow fumes rose from the craters constantly; their sides were shrouded with heavy ash. We couldn’t detect a wind, but we knew there was a hot, sulfurous breeze sweeping in great continental tides across the face of the planet. Not enough for erosion, though. The craters rose up out of jagged gorges, huge towering spears of rock and rubble. Below were the vast yellow flatlands, smoking and hissing from the gases beneath the crust. Over everything was gray dust—silicates and salts, pumice and limestone and granite ash, filling crevices and declivities—offering a soft, treacherous surface for the Bug’s pillow tires. I learned to read the ground, to tell a covered fault by the sag of the dust; I learned to spot a passable crack, and tell it from an impassable cut. Time after time the Bugs ground to a halt while we explored a passage on foot, tied together with light copper cable, digging, advancing, digging some more until we were sure the surface would carry the machines. It was cruel work; we slept in exhaustion. But it went smoothly, at first. Too smoothly, it seemed to me, and the others seemed to think so, too. McIvers’ restlessness was beginning to grate on our nerves. He talked too much, while we were resting or while we were driving; wisecracks, witticisms, unfunny jokes that wore thin with repetition. He took to making side trips from the route now and then, never far, but a little further each time. Jack Stone reacted quite the opposite; he grew quieter with each stop, more reserved and apprehensive. I didn’t like it, but I figured that it would pass off after a while. I was apprehensive enough myself; I just managed to hide it better. And every mile the Sun got bigger and whiter and higher in the sky and hotter. Without our ultra-violet screens and glare filters we would have been blinded; as it was our eyes ached constantly and the skin on our faces itched and tingled at the end of an eight-hour trek. But it took one of those side trips of McIvers’ to deliver the penultimate blow to our already fraying nerves. He had driven down a side-branch of a long canyon running off west of our route and was almost out of sight in a cloud of ash when we heard a sharp cry through our earphones. I wheeled my Bug around with my heart in my throat and spotted him through the binocs, waving frantically from the top of his machine. The Major and I took off, lumbering down the gulch after him as fast as the Bugs could go, with a thousand horrible pictures racing through our minds.... We found him standing stock-still, pointing down the gorge and, for once, he didn’t have anything to say. It was the wreck of a Bug; an old-fashioned half-track model of the sort that hadn’t been in use for years. It was wedged tight in a cut in the rock, an axle broken, its casing split wide open up the middle, half-buried in a rock slide. A dozen feet away were two insulated suits with white bones gleaming through the fiberglass helmets. This was as far as Wyatt and Carpenter had gotten on their Brightside Crossing. On the fifth driving period out, the terrain began to change. It looked the same, but every now and then it felt different. On two occasions I felt my wheels spin, with a howl of protest from my engine. Then, quite suddenly, the Bug gave a lurch; I gunned my motor and nothing happened. I could see the dull gray stuff seeping up around the hubs, thick and tenacious, splattering around in steaming gobs as the wheels spun. I knew what had happened the moment the wheels gave and, a few minutes later, they chained me to the tractor and dragged me back out of the mire. It looked for all the world like thick gray mud, but it was a pit of molten lead, steaming under a soft layer of concealing ash. I picked my way more cautiously then. We were getting into an area of recent surface activity; the surface was really treacherous. I caught myself wishing that the Major had okayed McIvers’ scheme for an advanced scout; more dangerous for the individual, maybe, but I was driving blind now and I didn’t like it. One error in judgment could sink us all, but I wasn’t thinking much about the others. I was worried about me , plenty worried. I kept thinking, better McIvers should go than me. It wasn’t healthy thinking and I knew it, but I couldn’t get the thought out of my mind. It was a grueling eight hours and we slept poorly. Back in the Bug again, we moved still more slowly—edging out on a broad flat plateau, dodging a network of gaping surface cracks—winding back and forth in an effort to keep the machines on solid rock. I couldn’t see far ahead, because of the yellow haze rising from the cracks, so I was almost on top of it when I saw a sharp cut ahead where the surface dropped six feet beyond a deep crack. I let out a shout to halt the others; then I edged my Bug forward, peering at the cleft. It was deep and wide. I moved fifty yards to the left, then back to the right. There was only one place that looked like a possible crossing; a long, narrow ledge of gray stuff that lay down across a section of the fault like a ramp. Even as I watched it, I could feel the surface crust under the Bug trembling and saw the ledge shift over a few feet.

What is the plot of the story?

1

Peter Claney shows up at the Red Lion to convince James Baron not to go on his trip to the Brightside Crossing. Baron has been trying to find Claney for months to learn about his attempt at crossing the Brightside. Claney is the only person on earth who has attempted the ordeal and made it out alive, but Claney says that it simply cannot be done. It’s impossible. Claney explains that a major named Tom Mikuta recruited him to go on the trip. Major wanted to cross the Brightside of Mercury at perihelion, except he wanted to cross the entire surface of the planet. Claney admits he was afraid because he knew the story of the last two explorers who never returned from their trip. He is also fully aware that the only place hotter than the Brightside of Mercury at perihelion is the actual surface of the sun. Claney believes that it can be done, and he agrees to join Major’s team of men. Major and Claney meet up at The Twilight Lab, which is near the north pole of Mercury. Jack Stone, another member of the team, arrives with supplies and equipment. Claney is upset to learn that McIvers will also be joining the team. He thinks he is too much of a risk-taker. The men discuss Mercury’s atmosphere, and Claney realizes that there’s no way to prepare for a voyage this mysterious. There will be active volcanoes, but they have no idea where they will find them. McIvers finally shows up, and although he’s late, Major doesn’t make an issue of it. The team leaves the lab with a plan to reach the Center of Brightside in 30 days. They need to travel 70 miles per day. McIvers wants to know who will be out four or five miles ahead of the pack to evaluate the surface. Major sternly tells him that isn’t part of the plan - all team members will stay in sight of one another. Back at Red Lion, Claney tells Baron that the heat was unbearable, even when their suits kept them cool at 70 degrees. The sight of the sun tricked their minds into believing they were melting. The team drives for eight hours and then stops and sleeps for five. Most of the time, the men are unable to get any rest. The only thing that propels them forward is the fact that no one had ever succeeded before. Claney crosses Mercury’s difficult terrain, which includes mounds of dust and impassable cracks. At one point, McIvers drives down a long canyon. Claney sees that McIvers is waving to get his attention, so he follows his lead. McIvers finds wrecked vehicles; this is the spot where the two explorers died. Claney begins to experience difficulties with his Bug. He comes to a six foot drop that his vehicle cannot pass over. He sees a narrow ledge that resembles a ramp.

49165

Brightside Crossing by Alan E. Nourse JAMES BARON was not pleased to hear that he had had a visitor when he reached the Red Lion that evening. He had no stomach for mysteries, vast or trifling, and there were pressing things to think about at this time. Yet the doorman had flagged him as he came in from the street: “A thousand pardons, Mr. Baron. The gentleman—he would leave no name. He said you’d want to see him. He will be back by eight.” Now Baron drummed his fingers on the table top, staring about the quiet lounge. Street trade was discouraged at the Red Lion, gently but persuasively; the patrons were few in number. Across to the right was a group that Baron knew vaguely—Andean climbers, or at least two of them were. Over near the door he recognized old Balmer, who had mapped the first passage to the core of Vulcan Crater on Venus. Baron returned his smile with a nod. Then he settled back and waited impatiently for the intruder who demanded his time without justifying it. Presently a small, grizzled man crossed the room and sat down at Baron’s table. He was short and wiry. His face held no key to his age—he might have been thirty or a thousand—but he looked weary and immensely ugly. His cheeks and forehead were twisted and brown, with scars that were still healing. The stranger said, “I’m glad you waited. I’ve heard you’re planning to attempt the Brightside.” Baron stared at the man for a moment. “I see you can read telecasts,” he said coldly. “The news was correct. We are going to make a Brightside Crossing.” “At perihelion?” “Of course. When else?” The grizzled man searched Baron’s face for a moment without expression. Then he said slowly, “No, I’m afraid you’re not going to make the Crossing.” “Say, who are you, if you don’t mind?” Baron demanded. “The name is Claney,” said the stranger. There was a silence. Then: “Claney? Peter Claney?” “That’s right.” Baron’s eyes were wide with excitement, all trace of anger gone. “Great balls of fire, man— where have you been hiding? We’ve been trying to contact you for months!” “I know. I was hoping you’d quit looking and chuck the whole idea.” “Quit looking!” Baron bent forward over the table. “My friend, we’d given up hope, but we’ve never quit looking. Here, have a drink. There’s so much you can tell us.” His fingers were trembling. Peter Claney shook his head. “I can’t tell you anything you want to hear.” “But you’ve got to. You’re the only man on Earth who’s attempted a Brightside Crossing and lived through it! And the story you cleared for the news—it was nothing. We need details . Where did your equipment fall down? Where did you miscalculate? What were the trouble spots?” Baron jabbed a finger at Claney’s face. “That, for instance—epithelioma? Why? What was wrong with your glass? Your filters? We’ve got to know those things. If you can tell us, we can make it across where your attempt failed—” “You want to know why we failed?” asked Claney. “Of course we want to know. We have to know.” “It’s simple. We failed because it can’t be done. We couldn’t do it and neither can you. No human beings will ever cross the Brightside alive, not if they try for centuries.” “Nonsense,” Baron declared. “We will.” Claney shrugged. “I was there. I know what I’m saying. You can blame the equipment or the men—there were flaws in both quarters—but we just didn’t know what we were fighting. It was the planet that whipped us, that and the Sun . They’ll whip you, too, if you try it.” “Never,” said Baron. “Let me tell you,” Peter Claney said. I’d been interested in the Brightside for almost as long as I can remember (Claney said). I guess I was about ten when Wyatt and Carpenter made the last attempt—that was in 2082, I think. I followed the news stories like a tri-V serial and then I was heartbroken when they just disappeared. I know now that they were a pair of idiots, starting off without proper equipment, with practically no knowledge of surface conditions, without any charts—they couldn’t have made a hundred miles—but I didn’t know that then and it was a terrible tragedy. After that, I followed Sanderson’s work in the Twilight Lab up there and began to get Brightside into my blood, sure as death. But it was Mikuta’s idea to attempt a Crossing. Did you ever know Tom Mikuta? I don’t suppose you did. No, not Japanese—Polish-American. He was a major in the Interplanetary Service for some years and hung onto the title after he gave up his commission. He was with Armstrong on Mars during his Service days, did a good deal of the original mapping and surveying for the Colony there. I first met him on Venus; we spent five years together up there doing some of the nastiest exploring since the Matto Grasso. Then he made the attempt on Vulcan Crater that paved the way for Balmer a few years later. I’d always liked the Major—he was big and quiet and cool, the sort of guy who always had things figured a little further ahead than anyone else and always knew what to do in a tight place. Too many men in this game are all nerve and luck, with no judgment. The Major had both. He also had the kind of personality that could take a crew of wild men and make them work like a well-oiled machine across a thousand miles of Venus jungle. I liked him and I trusted him. He contacted me in New York and he was very casual at first. We spent an evening here at the Red Lion, talking about old times; he told me about the Vulcan business, and how he’d been out to see Sanderson and the Twilight Lab on Mercury, and how he preferred a hot trek to a cold one any day of the year—and then he wanted to know what I’d been doing since Venus and what my plans were. “No particular plans,” I told him. “Why?” He looked me over. “How much do you weigh, Peter?” I told him one-thirty-five. “That much!” he said. “Well, there can’t be much fat on you, at any rate. How do you take heat?” “You should know,” I said. “Venus was no icebox.” “No, I mean real heat.” Then I began to get it. “You’re planning a trip.” “That’s right. A hot trip.” He grinned at me. “Might be dangerous, too.” “What trip?” “Brightside of Mercury,” the Major said. I whistled cautiously. “At aphelion?” He threw his head back. “Why try a Crossing at aphelion? What have you done then? Four thousand miles of butcherous heat, just to have some joker come along, use your data and drum you out of the glory by crossing at perihelion forty-four days later? No, thanks. I want the Brightside without any nonsense about it.” He leaned across me eagerly. “I want to make a Crossing at perihelion and I want to cross on the surface. If a man can do that, he’s got Mercury. Until then, nobody’s got Mercury. I want Mercury—but I’ll need help getting it.” I’d thought of it a thousand times and never dared consider it. Nobody had, since Wyatt and Carpenter disappeared. Mercury turns on its axis in the same time that it wheels around the Sun, which means that the Brightside is always facing in. That makes the Brightside of Mercury at perihelion the hottest place in the Solar System, with one single exception: the surface of the Sun itself. It would be a hellish trek. Only a few men had ever learned just how hellish and they never came back to tell about it. It was a real hell’s Crossing, but someday, I thought, somebody would cross it. I wanted to be along. The Twilight Lab, near the northern pole of Mercury, was the obvious jumping-off place. The setup there wasn’t very extensive—a rocket landing, the labs and quarters for Sanderson’s crew sunk deep into the crust, and the tower that housed the Solar ’scope that Sanderson had built up there ten years before. Twilight Lab wasn’t particularly interested in the Brightside, of course—the Sun was Sanderson’s baby and he’d picked Mercury as the closest chunk of rock to the Sun that could hold his observatory. He’d chosen a good location, too. On Mercury, the Brightside temperature hits 770° F. at perihelion and the Darkside runs pretty constant at -410° F. No permanent installation with a human crew could survive at either extreme. But with Mercury’s wobble, the twilight zone between Brightside and Darkside offers something closer to survival temperatures. Sanderson built the Lab up near the pole, where the zone is about five miles wide, so the temperature only varies 50 to 60 degrees with the libration. The Solar ’scope could take that much change and they’d get good clear observation of the Sun for about seventy out of the eighty-eight days it takes the planet to wheel around. The Major was counting on Sanderson knowing something about Mercury as well as the Sun when we camped at the Lab to make final preparations. Sanderson did. He thought we’d lost our minds and he said so, but he gave us all the help he could. He spent a week briefing Jack Stone, the third member of our party, who had arrived with the supplies and equipment a few days earlier. Poor Jack met us at the rocket landing almost bawling, Sanderson had given him such a gloomy picture of what Brightside was like. Stone was a youngster—hardly twenty-five, I’d say—but he’d been with the Major at Vulcan and had begged to join this trek. I had a funny feeling that Jack really didn’t care for exploring too much, but he thought Mikuta was God, followed him around like a puppy. It didn’t matter to me as long as he knew what he was getting in for. You don’t go asking people in this game why they do it—they’re liable to get awfully uneasy and none of them can ever give you an answer that makes sense. Anyway, Stone had borrowed three men from the Lab, and had the supplies and equipment all lined up when we got there, ready to check and test. We dug right in. With plenty of funds—tri-V money and some government cash the Major had talked his way around—our equipment was new and good. Mikuta had done the designing and testing himself, with a big assist from Sanderson. We had four Bugs, three of them the light pillow-tire models, with special lead-cooled cut-in engines when the heat set in, and one heavy-duty tractor model for pulling the sledges. The Major went over them like a kid at the circus. Then he said, “Have you heard anything from McIvers?” “Who’s he?” Stone wanted to know. “He’ll be joining us. He’s a good man—got quite a name for climbing, back home.” The Major turned to me. “You’ve probably heard of him.” I’d heard plenty of stories about Ted McIvers and I wasn’t too happy to hear that he was joining us. “Kind of a daredevil, isn’t he?” “Maybe. He’s lucky and skillful. Where do you draw the line? We’ll need plenty of both.” “Have you ever worked with him?” I asked. “No. Are you worried?” “Not exactly. But Brightside is no place to count on luck.” The Major laughed. “I don’t think we need to worry about McIvers. We understood each other when I talked up the trip to him and we’re going to need each other too much to do any fooling around.” He turned back to the supply list. “Meanwhile, let’s get this stuff listed and packed. We’ll need to cut weight sharply and our time is short. Sanderson says we should leave in three days.” Two days later, McIvers hadn’t arrived. The Major didn’t say much about it. Stone was getting edgy and so was I. We spent the second day studying charts of the Brightside, such as they were. The best available were pretty poor, taken from so far out that the detail dissolved into blurs on blow-up. They showed the biggest ranges of peaks and craters and faults, and that was all. Still, we could use them to plan a broad outline of our course. “This range here,” the Major said as we crowded around the board, “is largely inactive, according to Sanderson. But these to the south and west could be active. Seismograph tracings suggest a lot of activity in that region, getting worse down toward the equator—not only volcanic, but sub-surface shifting.” Stone nodded. “Sanderson told me there was probably constant surface activity.” The Major shrugged. “Well, it’s treacherous, there’s no doubt of it. But the only way to avoid it is to travel over the Pole, which would lose us days and offer us no guarantee of less activity to the west. Now we might avoid some if we could find a pass through this range and cut sharp east—” It seemed that the more we considered the problem, the further we got from a solution. We knew there were active volcanoes on the Brightside—even on the Darkside, though surface activity there was pretty much slowed down and localized. But there were problems of atmosphere on Brightside, as well. There was an atmosphere and a constant atmospheric flow from Brightside to Darkside. Not much—the lighter gases had reached escape velocity and disappeared from Brightside millennia ago—but there was CO 2 , and nitrogen, and traces of other heavier gases. There was also an abundance of sulfur vapor, as well as carbon disulfide and sulfur dioxide. The atmospheric tide moved toward the Darkside, where it condensed, carrying enough volcanic ash with it for Sanderson to estimate the depth and nature of the surface upheavals on Brightside from his samplings. The trick was to find a passage that avoided those upheavals as far as possible. But in the final analysis, we were barely scraping the surface. The only way we would find out what was happening where was to be there. Finally, on the third day, McIvers blew in on a freight rocket from Venus. He’d missed the ship that the Major and I had taken by a few hours, and had conned his way to Venus in hopes of getting a hop from there. He didn’t seem too upset about it, as though this were his usual way of doing things and he couldn’t see why everyone should get so excited. He was a tall, rangy man with long, wavy hair prematurely gray, and the sort of eyes that looked like a climber’s—half-closed, sleepy, almost indolent, but capable of abrupt alertness. And he never stood still; he was always moving, always doing something with his hands, or talking, or pacing about. Evidently the Major decided not to press the issue of his arrival. There was still work to do, and an hour later we were running the final tests on the pressure suits. That evening, Stone and McIvers were thick as thieves, and everything was set for an early departure after we got some rest. “And that,” said Baron, finishing his drink and signaling the waiter for another pair, “was your first big mistake.” Peter Claney raised his eyebrows. “McIvers?” “Of course.” Claney shrugged, glanced at the small quiet tables around them. “There are lots of bizarre personalities around a place like this, and some of the best wouldn’t seem to be the most reliable at first glance. Anyway, personality problems weren’t our big problem right then. Equipment worried us first and route next.” Baron nodded in agreement. “What kind of suits did you have?” “The best insulating suits ever made,” said Claney. “Each one had an inner lining of a fiberglass modification, to avoid the clumsiness of asbestos, and carried the refrigerating unit and oxygen storage which we recharged from the sledges every eight hours. Outer layer carried a monomolecular chrome reflecting surface that made us glitter like Christmas trees. And we had a half-inch dead-air space under positive pressure between the two layers. Warning thermocouples, of course—at 770 degrees, it wouldn’t take much time to fry us to cinders if the suits failed somewhere.” “How about the Bugs?” “They were insulated, too, but we weren’t counting on them too much for protection.” “You weren’t!” Baron exclaimed. “Why not?” “We’d be in and out of them too much. They gave us mobility and storage, but we knew we’d have to do a lot of forward work on foot.” Claney smiled bitterly. “Which meant that we had an inch of fiberglass and a half-inch of dead air between us and a surface temperature where lead flowed like water and zinc was almost at melting point and the pools of sulfur in the shadows were boiling like oatmeal over a campfire.” Baron licked his lips. His fingers stroked the cool, wet glass as he set it down on the tablecloth. “Go on,” he said tautly. “You started on schedule?” “Oh, yes,” said Claney, “we started on schedule, all right. We just didn’t quite end on schedule, that was all. But I’m getting to that.” He settled back in his chair and continued. We jumped off from Twilight on a course due southeast with thirty days to make it to the Center of Brightside. If we could cross an average of seventy miles a day, we could hit Center exactly at perihelion, the point of Mercury’s closest approach to the Sun—which made Center the hottest part of the planet at the hottest it ever gets. The Sun was already huge and yellow over the horizon when we started, twice the size it appears on Earth. Every day that Sun would grow bigger and whiter, and every day the surface would get hotter. But once we reached Center, the job was only half done—we would still have to travel another two thousand miles to the opposite twilight zone. Sanderson was to meet us on the other side in the Laboratory’s scout ship, approximately sixty days from the time we jumped off. That was the plan, in outline. It was up to us to cross those seventy miles a day, no matter how hot it became, no matter what terrain we had to cross. Detours would be dangerous and time-consuming. Delays could cost us our lives. We all knew that. The Major briefed us on details an hour before we left. “Peter, you’ll take the lead Bug, the small one we stripped down for you. Stone and I will flank you on either side, giving you a hundred-yard lead. McIvers, you’ll have the job of dragging the sledges, so we’ll have to direct your course pretty closely. Peter’s job is to pick the passage at any given point. If there’s any doubt of safe passage, we’ll all explore ahead on foot before we risk the Bugs. Got that?” McIvers and Stone exchanged glances. McIvers said: “Jack and I were planning to change around. We figured he could take the sledges. That would give me a little more mobility.” The Major looked up sharply at Stone. “Do you buy that, Jack?” Stone shrugged. “I don’t mind. Mac wanted—” McIvers made an impatient gesture with his hands. “It doesn’t matter. I just feel better when I’m on the move. Does it make any difference?” “I guess it doesn’t,” said the Major. “Then you’ll flank Peter along with me. Right?” “Sure, sure.” McIvers pulled at his lower lip. “Who’s going to do the advance scouting?” “It sounds like I am,” I cut in. “We want to keep the lead Bug light as possible.” Mikuta nodded. “That’s right. Peter’s Bug is stripped down to the frame and wheels.” McIvers shook his head. “No, I mean the advance work. You need somebody out ahead—four or five miles, at least—to pick up the big flaws and active surface changes, don’t you?” He stared at the Major. “I mean, how can we tell what sort of a hole we may be moving into, unless we have a scout up ahead?” “That’s what we have the charts for,” the Major said sharply. “Charts! I’m talking about detail work. We don’t need to worry about the major topography. It’s the little faults you can’t see on the pictures that can kill us.” He tossed the charts down excitedly. “Look, let me take a Bug out ahead and work reconnaissance, keep five, maybe ten miles ahead of the column. I can stay on good solid ground, of course, but scan the area closely and radio back to Peter where to avoid the flaws. Then—” “No dice,” the Major broke in. “But why not? We could save ourselves days!” “I don’t care what we could save. We stay together. When we get to the Center, I want live men along with me. That means we stay within easy sight of each other at all times. Any climber knows that everybody is safer in a party than one man alone—any time, any place.” McIvers stared at him, his cheeks an angry red. Finally he gave a sullen nod. “Okay. If you say so.” “Well, I say so and I mean it. I don’t want any fancy stuff. We’re going to hit Center together, and finish the Crossing together. Got that?” McIvers nodded. Mikuta then looked at Stone and me and we nodded, too. “All right,” he said slowly. “Now that we’ve got it straight, let’s go.” It was hot. If I forget everything else about that trek, I’ll never forget that huge yellow Sun glaring down, without a break, hotter and hotter with every mile. We knew that the first few days would be the easiest and we were rested and fresh when we started down the long ragged gorge southeast of the Twilight Lab. I moved out first; back over my shoulder, I could see the Major and McIvers crawling out behind me, their pillow tires taking the rugged floor of the gorge smoothly. Behind them, Stone dragged the sledges. Even at only 30 per cent Earth gravity they were a strain on the big tractor, until the ski-blades bit into the fluffy volcanic ash blanketing the valley. We even had a path to follow for the first twenty miles. I kept my eyes pasted to the big polaroid binocs, picking out the track the early research teams had made out into the edge of Brightside. But in a couple of hours we rumbled past Sanderson’s little outpost observatory and the tracks stopped. We were in virgin territory and already the Sun was beginning to bite. We didn’t feel the heat so much those first days out. We saw it. The refrig units kept our skins at a nice comfortable seventy-five degrees Fahrenheit inside our suits, but our eyes watched that glaring Sun and the baked yellow rocks going past, and some nerve pathways got twisted up, somehow. We poured sweat as if we were in a superheated furnace. We drove eight hours and slept five. When a sleep period came due, we pulled the Bugs together into a square, threw up a light aluminum sun-shield and lay out in the dust and rocks. The sun-shield cut the temperature down sixty or seventy degrees, for whatever help that was. And then we ate from the forward sledge—sucking through tubes—protein, carbohydrates, bulk gelatin, vitamins. The Major measured water out with an iron hand, because we’d have drunk ourselves into nephritis in a week otherwise. We were constantly, unceasingly thirsty. Ask the physiologists and psychiatrists why—they can give you have a dozen interesting reasons—but all we knew, or cared about, was that it happened to be so. We didn’t sleep the first few stops, as a consequence. Our eyes burned in spite of the filters and we had roaring headaches, but we couldn’t sleep them off. We sat around looking at each other. Then McIvers would say how good a beer would taste, and off we’d go. We’d have murdered our grandmothers for one ice-cold bottle of beer. After a few driving periods, I began to get my bearings at the wheel. We were moving down into desolation that made Earth’s old Death Valley look like a Japanese rose garden. Huge sun-baked cracks opened up in the floor of the gorge, with black cliffs jutting up on either side; the air was filled with a barely visible yellowish mist of sulfur and sulfurous gases. It was a hot, barren hole, no place for any man to go, but the challenge was so powerful you could almost feel it. No one had ever crossed this land before and escaped. Those who had tried it had been cruelly punished, but the land was still there, so it had to be crossed. Not the easy way. It had to be crossed the hardest way possible: overland, through anything the land could throw up to us, at the most difficult time possible. Yet we knew that even the land might have been conquered before, except for that Sun. We’d fought absolute cold before and won. We’d never fought heat like this and won. The only worse heat in the Solar System was the surface of the Sun itself. Brightside was worth trying for. We would get it or it would get us. That was the bargain. I learned a lot about Mercury those first few driving periods. The gorge petered out after a hundred miles and we moved onto the slope of a range of ragged craters that ran south and east. This range had shown no activity since the first landing on Mercury forty years before, but beyond it there were active cones. Yellow fumes rose from the craters constantly; their sides were shrouded with heavy ash. We couldn’t detect a wind, but we knew there was a hot, sulfurous breeze sweeping in great continental tides across the face of the planet. Not enough for erosion, though. The craters rose up out of jagged gorges, huge towering spears of rock and rubble. Below were the vast yellow flatlands, smoking and hissing from the gases beneath the crust. Over everything was gray dust—silicates and salts, pumice and limestone and granite ash, filling crevices and declivities—offering a soft, treacherous surface for the Bug’s pillow tires. I learned to read the ground, to tell a covered fault by the sag of the dust; I learned to spot a passable crack, and tell it from an impassable cut. Time after time the Bugs ground to a halt while we explored a passage on foot, tied together with light copper cable, digging, advancing, digging some more until we were sure the surface would carry the machines. It was cruel work; we slept in exhaustion. But it went smoothly, at first. Too smoothly, it seemed to me, and the others seemed to think so, too. McIvers’ restlessness was beginning to grate on our nerves. He talked too much, while we were resting or while we were driving; wisecracks, witticisms, unfunny jokes that wore thin with repetition. He took to making side trips from the route now and then, never far, but a little further each time. Jack Stone reacted quite the opposite; he grew quieter with each stop, more reserved and apprehensive. I didn’t like it, but I figured that it would pass off after a while. I was apprehensive enough myself; I just managed to hide it better. And every mile the Sun got bigger and whiter and higher in the sky and hotter. Without our ultra-violet screens and glare filters we would have been blinded; as it was our eyes ached constantly and the skin on our faces itched and tingled at the end of an eight-hour trek. But it took one of those side trips of McIvers’ to deliver the penultimate blow to our already fraying nerves. He had driven down a side-branch of a long canyon running off west of our route and was almost out of sight in a cloud of ash when we heard a sharp cry through our earphones. I wheeled my Bug around with my heart in my throat and spotted him through the binocs, waving frantically from the top of his machine. The Major and I took off, lumbering down the gulch after him as fast as the Bugs could go, with a thousand horrible pictures racing through our minds.... We found him standing stock-still, pointing down the gorge and, for once, he didn’t have anything to say. It was the wreck of a Bug; an old-fashioned half-track model of the sort that hadn’t been in use for years. It was wedged tight in a cut in the rock, an axle broken, its casing split wide open up the middle, half-buried in a rock slide. A dozen feet away were two insulated suits with white bones gleaming through the fiberglass helmets. This was as far as Wyatt and Carpenter had gotten on their Brightside Crossing. On the fifth driving period out, the terrain began to change. It looked the same, but every now and then it felt different. On two occasions I felt my wheels spin, with a howl of protest from my engine. Then, quite suddenly, the Bug gave a lurch; I gunned my motor and nothing happened. I could see the dull gray stuff seeping up around the hubs, thick and tenacious, splattering around in steaming gobs as the wheels spun. I knew what had happened the moment the wheels gave and, a few minutes later, they chained me to the tractor and dragged me back out of the mire. It looked for all the world like thick gray mud, but it was a pit of molten lead, steaming under a soft layer of concealing ash. I picked my way more cautiously then. We were getting into an area of recent surface activity; the surface was really treacherous. I caught myself wishing that the Major had okayed McIvers’ scheme for an advanced scout; more dangerous for the individual, maybe, but I was driving blind now and I didn’t like it. One error in judgment could sink us all, but I wasn’t thinking much about the others. I was worried about me , plenty worried. I kept thinking, better McIvers should go than me. It wasn’t healthy thinking and I knew it, but I couldn’t get the thought out of my mind. It was a grueling eight hours and we slept poorly. Back in the Bug again, we moved still more slowly—edging out on a broad flat plateau, dodging a network of gaping surface cracks—winding back and forth in an effort to keep the machines on solid rock. I couldn’t see far ahead, because of the yellow haze rising from the cracks, so I was almost on top of it when I saw a sharp cut ahead where the surface dropped six feet beyond a deep crack. I let out a shout to halt the others; then I edged my Bug forward, peering at the cleft. It was deep and wide. I moved fifty yards to the left, then back to the right. There was only one place that looked like a possible crossing; a long, narrow ledge of gray stuff that lay down across a section of the fault like a ramp. Even as I watched it, I could feel the surface crust under the Bug trembling and saw the ledge shift over a few feet.

Who is McIvers, and what happens to him throughout the story?

6

From the get-go, Claney is clear in his obvious mistrust of McIvers and his preceding reputation. Late to Mercury, he arrives ready to explore. With long, gray hair and paradoxically drowsy yet alert eyes, McIvers’ constant movement and chatter get on his colleague’s nerves. McIvers is a famous climber known for pushing the boundaries and being a daredevil. After his arrival on Mercury, he and the crew soon set out for their treacherous journey to the Brightside Crossing. He switches spots with Stone, so he would have control of a Bug. He also asks to explore four or five miles ahead of the rest of the crew to see if it’s dangerous footing ahead. Mikuta quickly shuts him down. McIvers talks nonstop through the intercoms or when they’re supposed to be resting. As well, he disobeys Mikuta’s orders and occasionally drifts off from the rest of the group, discovering things as he goes. He never drifts far enough to receive any real punishment, though he does get farther away every time. During one of his side-explorations, he discovers a wrecked Bug and two corpses belonging to Wyatt and Carpenter, the previous explorers of the Brightside Crossing. With this shocking find, he returns to the crew in silence.

49165

Brightside Crossing by Alan E. Nourse JAMES BARON was not pleased to hear that he had had a visitor when he reached the Red Lion that evening. He had no stomach for mysteries, vast or trifling, and there were pressing things to think about at this time. Yet the doorman had flagged him as he came in from the street: “A thousand pardons, Mr. Baron. The gentleman—he would leave no name. He said you’d want to see him. He will be back by eight.” Now Baron drummed his fingers on the table top, staring about the quiet lounge. Street trade was discouraged at the Red Lion, gently but persuasively; the patrons were few in number. Across to the right was a group that Baron knew vaguely—Andean climbers, or at least two of them were. Over near the door he recognized old Balmer, who had mapped the first passage to the core of Vulcan Crater on Venus. Baron returned his smile with a nod. Then he settled back and waited impatiently for the intruder who demanded his time without justifying it. Presently a small, grizzled man crossed the room and sat down at Baron’s table. He was short and wiry. His face held no key to his age—he might have been thirty or a thousand—but he looked weary and immensely ugly. His cheeks and forehead were twisted and brown, with scars that were still healing. The stranger said, “I’m glad you waited. I’ve heard you’re planning to attempt the Brightside.” Baron stared at the man for a moment. “I see you can read telecasts,” he said coldly. “The news was correct. We are going to make a Brightside Crossing.” “At perihelion?” “Of course. When else?” The grizzled man searched Baron’s face for a moment without expression. Then he said slowly, “No, I’m afraid you’re not going to make the Crossing.” “Say, who are you, if you don’t mind?” Baron demanded. “The name is Claney,” said the stranger. There was a silence. Then: “Claney? Peter Claney?” “That’s right.” Baron’s eyes were wide with excitement, all trace of anger gone. “Great balls of fire, man— where have you been hiding? We’ve been trying to contact you for months!” “I know. I was hoping you’d quit looking and chuck the whole idea.” “Quit looking!” Baron bent forward over the table. “My friend, we’d given up hope, but we’ve never quit looking. Here, have a drink. There’s so much you can tell us.” His fingers were trembling. Peter Claney shook his head. “I can’t tell you anything you want to hear.” “But you’ve got to. You’re the only man on Earth who’s attempted a Brightside Crossing and lived through it! And the story you cleared for the news—it was nothing. We need details . Where did your equipment fall down? Where did you miscalculate? What were the trouble spots?” Baron jabbed a finger at Claney’s face. “That, for instance—epithelioma? Why? What was wrong with your glass? Your filters? We’ve got to know those things. If you can tell us, we can make it across where your attempt failed—” “You want to know why we failed?” asked Claney. “Of course we want to know. We have to know.” “It’s simple. We failed because it can’t be done. We couldn’t do it and neither can you. No human beings will ever cross the Brightside alive, not if they try for centuries.” “Nonsense,” Baron declared. “We will.” Claney shrugged. “I was there. I know what I’m saying. You can blame the equipment or the men—there were flaws in both quarters—but we just didn’t know what we were fighting. It was the planet that whipped us, that and the Sun . They’ll whip you, too, if you try it.” “Never,” said Baron. “Let me tell you,” Peter Claney said. I’d been interested in the Brightside for almost as long as I can remember (Claney said). I guess I was about ten when Wyatt and Carpenter made the last attempt—that was in 2082, I think. I followed the news stories like a tri-V serial and then I was heartbroken when they just disappeared. I know now that they were a pair of idiots, starting off without proper equipment, with practically no knowledge of surface conditions, without any charts—they couldn’t have made a hundred miles—but I didn’t know that then and it was a terrible tragedy. After that, I followed Sanderson’s work in the Twilight Lab up there and began to get Brightside into my blood, sure as death. But it was Mikuta’s idea to attempt a Crossing. Did you ever know Tom Mikuta? I don’t suppose you did. No, not Japanese—Polish-American. He was a major in the Interplanetary Service for some years and hung onto the title after he gave up his commission. He was with Armstrong on Mars during his Service days, did a good deal of the original mapping and surveying for the Colony there. I first met him on Venus; we spent five years together up there doing some of the nastiest exploring since the Matto Grasso. Then he made the attempt on Vulcan Crater that paved the way for Balmer a few years later. I’d always liked the Major—he was big and quiet and cool, the sort of guy who always had things figured a little further ahead than anyone else and always knew what to do in a tight place. Too many men in this game are all nerve and luck, with no judgment. The Major had both. He also had the kind of personality that could take a crew of wild men and make them work like a well-oiled machine across a thousand miles of Venus jungle. I liked him and I trusted him. He contacted me in New York and he was very casual at first. We spent an evening here at the Red Lion, talking about old times; he told me about the Vulcan business, and how he’d been out to see Sanderson and the Twilight Lab on Mercury, and how he preferred a hot trek to a cold one any day of the year—and then he wanted to know what I’d been doing since Venus and what my plans were. “No particular plans,” I told him. “Why?” He looked me over. “How much do you weigh, Peter?” I told him one-thirty-five. “That much!” he said. “Well, there can’t be much fat on you, at any rate. How do you take heat?” “You should know,” I said. “Venus was no icebox.” “No, I mean real heat.” Then I began to get it. “You’re planning a trip.” “That’s right. A hot trip.” He grinned at me. “Might be dangerous, too.” “What trip?” “Brightside of Mercury,” the Major said. I whistled cautiously. “At aphelion?” He threw his head back. “Why try a Crossing at aphelion? What have you done then? Four thousand miles of butcherous heat, just to have some joker come along, use your data and drum you out of the glory by crossing at perihelion forty-four days later? No, thanks. I want the Brightside without any nonsense about it.” He leaned across me eagerly. “I want to make a Crossing at perihelion and I want to cross on the surface. If a man can do that, he’s got Mercury. Until then, nobody’s got Mercury. I want Mercury—but I’ll need help getting it.” I’d thought of it a thousand times and never dared consider it. Nobody had, since Wyatt and Carpenter disappeared. Mercury turns on its axis in the same time that it wheels around the Sun, which means that the Brightside is always facing in. That makes the Brightside of Mercury at perihelion the hottest place in the Solar System, with one single exception: the surface of the Sun itself. It would be a hellish trek. Only a few men had ever learned just how hellish and they never came back to tell about it. It was a real hell’s Crossing, but someday, I thought, somebody would cross it. I wanted to be along. The Twilight Lab, near the northern pole of Mercury, was the obvious jumping-off place. The setup there wasn’t very extensive—a rocket landing, the labs and quarters for Sanderson’s crew sunk deep into the crust, and the tower that housed the Solar ’scope that Sanderson had built up there ten years before. Twilight Lab wasn’t particularly interested in the Brightside, of course—the Sun was Sanderson’s baby and he’d picked Mercury as the closest chunk of rock to the Sun that could hold his observatory. He’d chosen a good location, too. On Mercury, the Brightside temperature hits 770° F. at perihelion and the Darkside runs pretty constant at -410° F. No permanent installation with a human crew could survive at either extreme. But with Mercury’s wobble, the twilight zone between Brightside and Darkside offers something closer to survival temperatures. Sanderson built the Lab up near the pole, where the zone is about five miles wide, so the temperature only varies 50 to 60 degrees with the libration. The Solar ’scope could take that much change and they’d get good clear observation of the Sun for about seventy out of the eighty-eight days it takes the planet to wheel around. The Major was counting on Sanderson knowing something about Mercury as well as the Sun when we camped at the Lab to make final preparations. Sanderson did. He thought we’d lost our minds and he said so, but he gave us all the help he could. He spent a week briefing Jack Stone, the third member of our party, who had arrived with the supplies and equipment a few days earlier. Poor Jack met us at the rocket landing almost bawling, Sanderson had given him such a gloomy picture of what Brightside was like. Stone was a youngster—hardly twenty-five, I’d say—but he’d been with the Major at Vulcan and had begged to join this trek. I had a funny feeling that Jack really didn’t care for exploring too much, but he thought Mikuta was God, followed him around like a puppy. It didn’t matter to me as long as he knew what he was getting in for. You don’t go asking people in this game why they do it—they’re liable to get awfully uneasy and none of them can ever give you an answer that makes sense. Anyway, Stone had borrowed three men from the Lab, and had the supplies and equipment all lined up when we got there, ready to check and test. We dug right in. With plenty of funds—tri-V money and some government cash the Major had talked his way around—our equipment was new and good. Mikuta had done the designing and testing himself, with a big assist from Sanderson. We had four Bugs, three of them the light pillow-tire models, with special lead-cooled cut-in engines when the heat set in, and one heavy-duty tractor model for pulling the sledges. The Major went over them like a kid at the circus. Then he said, “Have you heard anything from McIvers?” “Who’s he?” Stone wanted to know. “He’ll be joining us. He’s a good man—got quite a name for climbing, back home.” The Major turned to me. “You’ve probably heard of him.” I’d heard plenty of stories about Ted McIvers and I wasn’t too happy to hear that he was joining us. “Kind of a daredevil, isn’t he?” “Maybe. He’s lucky and skillful. Where do you draw the line? We’ll need plenty of both.” “Have you ever worked with him?” I asked. “No. Are you worried?” “Not exactly. But Brightside is no place to count on luck.” The Major laughed. “I don’t think we need to worry about McIvers. We understood each other when I talked up the trip to him and we’re going to need each other too much to do any fooling around.” He turned back to the supply list. “Meanwhile, let’s get this stuff listed and packed. We’ll need to cut weight sharply and our time is short. Sanderson says we should leave in three days.” Two days later, McIvers hadn’t arrived. The Major didn’t say much about it. Stone was getting edgy and so was I. We spent the second day studying charts of the Brightside, such as they were. The best available were pretty poor, taken from so far out that the detail dissolved into blurs on blow-up. They showed the biggest ranges of peaks and craters and faults, and that was all. Still, we could use them to plan a broad outline of our course. “This range here,” the Major said as we crowded around the board, “is largely inactive, according to Sanderson. But these to the south and west could be active. Seismograph tracings suggest a lot of activity in that region, getting worse down toward the equator—not only volcanic, but sub-surface shifting.” Stone nodded. “Sanderson told me there was probably constant surface activity.” The Major shrugged. “Well, it’s treacherous, there’s no doubt of it. But the only way to avoid it is to travel over the Pole, which would lose us days and offer us no guarantee of less activity to the west. Now we might avoid some if we could find a pass through this range and cut sharp east—” It seemed that the more we considered the problem, the further we got from a solution. We knew there were active volcanoes on the Brightside—even on the Darkside, though surface activity there was pretty much slowed down and localized. But there were problems of atmosphere on Brightside, as well. There was an atmosphere and a constant atmospheric flow from Brightside to Darkside. Not much—the lighter gases had reached escape velocity and disappeared from Brightside millennia ago—but there was CO 2 , and nitrogen, and traces of other heavier gases. There was also an abundance of sulfur vapor, as well as carbon disulfide and sulfur dioxide. The atmospheric tide moved toward the Darkside, where it condensed, carrying enough volcanic ash with it for Sanderson to estimate the depth and nature of the surface upheavals on Brightside from his samplings. The trick was to find a passage that avoided those upheavals as far as possible. But in the final analysis, we were barely scraping the surface. The only way we would find out what was happening where was to be there. Finally, on the third day, McIvers blew in on a freight rocket from Venus. He’d missed the ship that the Major and I had taken by a few hours, and had conned his way to Venus in hopes of getting a hop from there. He didn’t seem too upset about it, as though this were his usual way of doing things and he couldn’t see why everyone should get so excited. He was a tall, rangy man with long, wavy hair prematurely gray, and the sort of eyes that looked like a climber’s—half-closed, sleepy, almost indolent, but capable of abrupt alertness. And he never stood still; he was always moving, always doing something with his hands, or talking, or pacing about. Evidently the Major decided not to press the issue of his arrival. There was still work to do, and an hour later we were running the final tests on the pressure suits. That evening, Stone and McIvers were thick as thieves, and everything was set for an early departure after we got some rest. “And that,” said Baron, finishing his drink and signaling the waiter for another pair, “was your first big mistake.” Peter Claney raised his eyebrows. “McIvers?” “Of course.” Claney shrugged, glanced at the small quiet tables around them. “There are lots of bizarre personalities around a place like this, and some of the best wouldn’t seem to be the most reliable at first glance. Anyway, personality problems weren’t our big problem right then. Equipment worried us first and route next.” Baron nodded in agreement. “What kind of suits did you have?” “The best insulating suits ever made,” said Claney. “Each one had an inner lining of a fiberglass modification, to avoid the clumsiness of asbestos, and carried the refrigerating unit and oxygen storage which we recharged from the sledges every eight hours. Outer layer carried a monomolecular chrome reflecting surface that made us glitter like Christmas trees. And we had a half-inch dead-air space under positive pressure between the two layers. Warning thermocouples, of course—at 770 degrees, it wouldn’t take much time to fry us to cinders if the suits failed somewhere.” “How about the Bugs?” “They were insulated, too, but we weren’t counting on them too much for protection.” “You weren’t!” Baron exclaimed. “Why not?” “We’d be in and out of them too much. They gave us mobility and storage, but we knew we’d have to do a lot of forward work on foot.” Claney smiled bitterly. “Which meant that we had an inch of fiberglass and a half-inch of dead air between us and a surface temperature where lead flowed like water and zinc was almost at melting point and the pools of sulfur in the shadows were boiling like oatmeal over a campfire.” Baron licked his lips. His fingers stroked the cool, wet glass as he set it down on the tablecloth. “Go on,” he said tautly. “You started on schedule?” “Oh, yes,” said Claney, “we started on schedule, all right. We just didn’t quite end on schedule, that was all. But I’m getting to that.” He settled back in his chair and continued. We jumped off from Twilight on a course due southeast with thirty days to make it to the Center of Brightside. If we could cross an average of seventy miles a day, we could hit Center exactly at perihelion, the point of Mercury’s closest approach to the Sun—which made Center the hottest part of the planet at the hottest it ever gets. The Sun was already huge and yellow over the horizon when we started, twice the size it appears on Earth. Every day that Sun would grow bigger and whiter, and every day the surface would get hotter. But once we reached Center, the job was only half done—we would still have to travel another two thousand miles to the opposite twilight zone. Sanderson was to meet us on the other side in the Laboratory’s scout ship, approximately sixty days from the time we jumped off. That was the plan, in outline. It was up to us to cross those seventy miles a day, no matter how hot it became, no matter what terrain we had to cross. Detours would be dangerous and time-consuming. Delays could cost us our lives. We all knew that. The Major briefed us on details an hour before we left. “Peter, you’ll take the lead Bug, the small one we stripped down for you. Stone and I will flank you on either side, giving you a hundred-yard lead. McIvers, you’ll have the job of dragging the sledges, so we’ll have to direct your course pretty closely. Peter’s job is to pick the passage at any given point. If there’s any doubt of safe passage, we’ll all explore ahead on foot before we risk the Bugs. Got that?” McIvers and Stone exchanged glances. McIvers said: “Jack and I were planning to change around. We figured he could take the sledges. That would give me a little more mobility.” The Major looked up sharply at Stone. “Do you buy that, Jack?” Stone shrugged. “I don’t mind. Mac wanted—” McIvers made an impatient gesture with his hands. “It doesn’t matter. I just feel better when I’m on the move. Does it make any difference?” “I guess it doesn’t,” said the Major. “Then you’ll flank Peter along with me. Right?” “Sure, sure.” McIvers pulled at his lower lip. “Who’s going to do the advance scouting?” “It sounds like I am,” I cut in. “We want to keep the lead Bug light as possible.” Mikuta nodded. “That’s right. Peter’s Bug is stripped down to the frame and wheels.” McIvers shook his head. “No, I mean the advance work. You need somebody out ahead—four or five miles, at least—to pick up the big flaws and active surface changes, don’t you?” He stared at the Major. “I mean, how can we tell what sort of a hole we may be moving into, unless we have a scout up ahead?” “That’s what we have the charts for,” the Major said sharply. “Charts! I’m talking about detail work. We don’t need to worry about the major topography. It’s the little faults you can’t see on the pictures that can kill us.” He tossed the charts down excitedly. “Look, let me take a Bug out ahead and work reconnaissance, keep five, maybe ten miles ahead of the column. I can stay on good solid ground, of course, but scan the area closely and radio back to Peter where to avoid the flaws. Then—” “No dice,” the Major broke in. “But why not? We could save ourselves days!” “I don’t care what we could save. We stay together. When we get to the Center, I want live men along with me. That means we stay within easy sight of each other at all times. Any climber knows that everybody is safer in a party than one man alone—any time, any place.” McIvers stared at him, his cheeks an angry red. Finally he gave a sullen nod. “Okay. If you say so.” “Well, I say so and I mean it. I don’t want any fancy stuff. We’re going to hit Center together, and finish the Crossing together. Got that?” McIvers nodded. Mikuta then looked at Stone and me and we nodded, too. “All right,” he said slowly. “Now that we’ve got it straight, let’s go.” It was hot. If I forget everything else about that trek, I’ll never forget that huge yellow Sun glaring down, without a break, hotter and hotter with every mile. We knew that the first few days would be the easiest and we were rested and fresh when we started down the long ragged gorge southeast of the Twilight Lab. I moved out first; back over my shoulder, I could see the Major and McIvers crawling out behind me, their pillow tires taking the rugged floor of the gorge smoothly. Behind them, Stone dragged the sledges. Even at only 30 per cent Earth gravity they were a strain on the big tractor, until the ski-blades bit into the fluffy volcanic ash blanketing the valley. We even had a path to follow for the first twenty miles. I kept my eyes pasted to the big polaroid binocs, picking out the track the early research teams had made out into the edge of Brightside. But in a couple of hours we rumbled past Sanderson’s little outpost observatory and the tracks stopped. We were in virgin territory and already the Sun was beginning to bite. We didn’t feel the heat so much those first days out. We saw it. The refrig units kept our skins at a nice comfortable seventy-five degrees Fahrenheit inside our suits, but our eyes watched that glaring Sun and the baked yellow rocks going past, and some nerve pathways got twisted up, somehow. We poured sweat as if we were in a superheated furnace. We drove eight hours and slept five. When a sleep period came due, we pulled the Bugs together into a square, threw up a light aluminum sun-shield and lay out in the dust and rocks. The sun-shield cut the temperature down sixty or seventy degrees, for whatever help that was. And then we ate from the forward sledge—sucking through tubes—protein, carbohydrates, bulk gelatin, vitamins. The Major measured water out with an iron hand, because we’d have drunk ourselves into nephritis in a week otherwise. We were constantly, unceasingly thirsty. Ask the physiologists and psychiatrists why—they can give you have a dozen interesting reasons—but all we knew, or cared about, was that it happened to be so. We didn’t sleep the first few stops, as a consequence. Our eyes burned in spite of the filters and we had roaring headaches, but we couldn’t sleep them off. We sat around looking at each other. Then McIvers would say how good a beer would taste, and off we’d go. We’d have murdered our grandmothers for one ice-cold bottle of beer. After a few driving periods, I began to get my bearings at the wheel. We were moving down into desolation that made Earth’s old Death Valley look like a Japanese rose garden. Huge sun-baked cracks opened up in the floor of the gorge, with black cliffs jutting up on either side; the air was filled with a barely visible yellowish mist of sulfur and sulfurous gases. It was a hot, barren hole, no place for any man to go, but the challenge was so powerful you could almost feel it. No one had ever crossed this land before and escaped. Those who had tried it had been cruelly punished, but the land was still there, so it had to be crossed. Not the easy way. It had to be crossed the hardest way possible: overland, through anything the land could throw up to us, at the most difficult time possible. Yet we knew that even the land might have been conquered before, except for that Sun. We’d fought absolute cold before and won. We’d never fought heat like this and won. The only worse heat in the Solar System was the surface of the Sun itself. Brightside was worth trying for. We would get it or it would get us. That was the bargain. I learned a lot about Mercury those first few driving periods. The gorge petered out after a hundred miles and we moved onto the slope of a range of ragged craters that ran south and east. This range had shown no activity since the first landing on Mercury forty years before, but beyond it there were active cones. Yellow fumes rose from the craters constantly; their sides were shrouded with heavy ash. We couldn’t detect a wind, but we knew there was a hot, sulfurous breeze sweeping in great continental tides across the face of the planet. Not enough for erosion, though. The craters rose up out of jagged gorges, huge towering spears of rock and rubble. Below were the vast yellow flatlands, smoking and hissing from the gases beneath the crust. Over everything was gray dust—silicates and salts, pumice and limestone and granite ash, filling crevices and declivities—offering a soft, treacherous surface for the Bug’s pillow tires. I learned to read the ground, to tell a covered fault by the sag of the dust; I learned to spot a passable crack, and tell it from an impassable cut. Time after time the Bugs ground to a halt while we explored a passage on foot, tied together with light copper cable, digging, advancing, digging some more until we were sure the surface would carry the machines. It was cruel work; we slept in exhaustion. But it went smoothly, at first. Too smoothly, it seemed to me, and the others seemed to think so, too. McIvers’ restlessness was beginning to grate on our nerves. He talked too much, while we were resting or while we were driving; wisecracks, witticisms, unfunny jokes that wore thin with repetition. He took to making side trips from the route now and then, never far, but a little further each time. Jack Stone reacted quite the opposite; he grew quieter with each stop, more reserved and apprehensive. I didn’t like it, but I figured that it would pass off after a while. I was apprehensive enough myself; I just managed to hide it better. And every mile the Sun got bigger and whiter and higher in the sky and hotter. Without our ultra-violet screens and glare filters we would have been blinded; as it was our eyes ached constantly and the skin on our faces itched and tingled at the end of an eight-hour trek. But it took one of those side trips of McIvers’ to deliver the penultimate blow to our already fraying nerves. He had driven down a side-branch of a long canyon running off west of our route and was almost out of sight in a cloud of ash when we heard a sharp cry through our earphones. I wheeled my Bug around with my heart in my throat and spotted him through the binocs, waving frantically from the top of his machine. The Major and I took off, lumbering down the gulch after him as fast as the Bugs could go, with a thousand horrible pictures racing through our minds.... We found him standing stock-still, pointing down the gorge and, for once, he didn’t have anything to say. It was the wreck of a Bug; an old-fashioned half-track model of the sort that hadn’t been in use for years. It was wedged tight in a cut in the rock, an axle broken, its casing split wide open up the middle, half-buried in a rock slide. A dozen feet away were two insulated suits with white bones gleaming through the fiberglass helmets. This was as far as Wyatt and Carpenter had gotten on their Brightside Crossing. On the fifth driving period out, the terrain began to change. It looked the same, but every now and then it felt different. On two occasions I felt my wheels spin, with a howl of protest from my engine. Then, quite suddenly, the Bug gave a lurch; I gunned my motor and nothing happened. I could see the dull gray stuff seeping up around the hubs, thick and tenacious, splattering around in steaming gobs as the wheels spun. I knew what had happened the moment the wheels gave and, a few minutes later, they chained me to the tractor and dragged me back out of the mire. It looked for all the world like thick gray mud, but it was a pit of molten lead, steaming under a soft layer of concealing ash. I picked my way more cautiously then. We were getting into an area of recent surface activity; the surface was really treacherous. I caught myself wishing that the Major had okayed McIvers’ scheme for an advanced scout; more dangerous for the individual, maybe, but I was driving blind now and I didn’t like it. One error in judgment could sink us all, but I wasn’t thinking much about the others. I was worried about me , plenty worried. I kept thinking, better McIvers should go than me. It wasn’t healthy thinking and I knew it, but I couldn’t get the thought out of my mind. It was a grueling eight hours and we slept poorly. Back in the Bug again, we moved still more slowly—edging out on a broad flat plateau, dodging a network of gaping surface cracks—winding back and forth in an effort to keep the machines on solid rock. I couldn’t see far ahead, because of the yellow haze rising from the cracks, so I was almost on top of it when I saw a sharp cut ahead where the surface dropped six feet beyond a deep crack. I let out a shout to halt the others; then I edged my Bug forward, peering at the cleft. It was deep and wide. I moved fifty yards to the left, then back to the right. There was only one place that looked like a possible crossing; a long, narrow ledge of gray stuff that lay down across a section of the fault like a ramp. Even as I watched it, I could feel the surface crust under the Bug trembling and saw the ledge shift over a few feet.

Who is McIvers, and what happens to him throughout the story?

10

McIvers had a reputation in the climbing world for being both skilled and lucky, and the Major sought him out for the Brightside Crossing he was leading because he thought his skills would be useful. They had never met prior to this trip together, though they had spoken about the intent of the trip and that there would be no fooling around. The Major lets it slide that McIver shows up late, however, he does not approve of McIver’s plan to go ahead of the rest of the party to scout the terrain. This turns out to potentially be one of the big mistakes that foils their attempted crossing. During their crossing, tensions between the crew and McIver become frazzled because they are tired of McIver’s talking and bad jokes. McIver irritates the crew by taking little side trips away from the rest of them as they try to make forward progress through the Brightside. During one of those trips, McIver makes a significant discovery of two skeletons of the last known explorers. It is not known whether he lives or dies at the close of the crossing attempt that Peter is recollecting.

49165

Brightside Crossing by Alan E. Nourse JAMES BARON was not pleased to hear that he had had a visitor when he reached the Red Lion that evening. He had no stomach for mysteries, vast or trifling, and there were pressing things to think about at this time. Yet the doorman had flagged him as he came in from the street: “A thousand pardons, Mr. Baron. The gentleman—he would leave no name. He said you’d want to see him. He will be back by eight.” Now Baron drummed his fingers on the table top, staring about the quiet lounge. Street trade was discouraged at the Red Lion, gently but persuasively; the patrons were few in number. Across to the right was a group that Baron knew vaguely—Andean climbers, or at least two of them were. Over near the door he recognized old Balmer, who had mapped the first passage to the core of Vulcan Crater on Venus. Baron returned his smile with a nod. Then he settled back and waited impatiently for the intruder who demanded his time without justifying it. Presently a small, grizzled man crossed the room and sat down at Baron’s table. He was short and wiry. His face held no key to his age—he might have been thirty or a thousand—but he looked weary and immensely ugly. His cheeks and forehead were twisted and brown, with scars that were still healing. The stranger said, “I’m glad you waited. I’ve heard you’re planning to attempt the Brightside.” Baron stared at the man for a moment. “I see you can read telecasts,” he said coldly. “The news was correct. We are going to make a Brightside Crossing.” “At perihelion?” “Of course. When else?” The grizzled man searched Baron’s face for a moment without expression. Then he said slowly, “No, I’m afraid you’re not going to make the Crossing.” “Say, who are you, if you don’t mind?” Baron demanded. “The name is Claney,” said the stranger. There was a silence. Then: “Claney? Peter Claney?” “That’s right.” Baron’s eyes were wide with excitement, all trace of anger gone. “Great balls of fire, man— where have you been hiding? We’ve been trying to contact you for months!” “I know. I was hoping you’d quit looking and chuck the whole idea.” “Quit looking!” Baron bent forward over the table. “My friend, we’d given up hope, but we’ve never quit looking. Here, have a drink. There’s so much you can tell us.” His fingers were trembling. Peter Claney shook his head. “I can’t tell you anything you want to hear.” “But you’ve got to. You’re the only man on Earth who’s attempted a Brightside Crossing and lived through it! And the story you cleared for the news—it was nothing. We need details . Where did your equipment fall down? Where did you miscalculate? What were the trouble spots?” Baron jabbed a finger at Claney’s face. “That, for instance—epithelioma? Why? What was wrong with your glass? Your filters? We’ve got to know those things. If you can tell us, we can make it across where your attempt failed—” “You want to know why we failed?” asked Claney. “Of course we want to know. We have to know.” “It’s simple. We failed because it can’t be done. We couldn’t do it and neither can you. No human beings will ever cross the Brightside alive, not if they try for centuries.” “Nonsense,” Baron declared. “We will.” Claney shrugged. “I was there. I know what I’m saying. You can blame the equipment or the men—there were flaws in both quarters—but we just didn’t know what we were fighting. It was the planet that whipped us, that and the Sun . They’ll whip you, too, if you try it.” “Never,” said Baron. “Let me tell you,” Peter Claney said. I’d been interested in the Brightside for almost as long as I can remember (Claney said). I guess I was about ten when Wyatt and Carpenter made the last attempt—that was in 2082, I think. I followed the news stories like a tri-V serial and then I was heartbroken when they just disappeared. I know now that they were a pair of idiots, starting off without proper equipment, with practically no knowledge of surface conditions, without any charts—they couldn’t have made a hundred miles—but I didn’t know that then and it was a terrible tragedy. After that, I followed Sanderson’s work in the Twilight Lab up there and began to get Brightside into my blood, sure as death. But it was Mikuta’s idea to attempt a Crossing. Did you ever know Tom Mikuta? I don’t suppose you did. No, not Japanese—Polish-American. He was a major in the Interplanetary Service for some years and hung onto the title after he gave up his commission. He was with Armstrong on Mars during his Service days, did a good deal of the original mapping and surveying for the Colony there. I first met him on Venus; we spent five years together up there doing some of the nastiest exploring since the Matto Grasso. Then he made the attempt on Vulcan Crater that paved the way for Balmer a few years later. I’d always liked the Major—he was big and quiet and cool, the sort of guy who always had things figured a little further ahead than anyone else and always knew what to do in a tight place. Too many men in this game are all nerve and luck, with no judgment. The Major had both. He also had the kind of personality that could take a crew of wild men and make them work like a well-oiled machine across a thousand miles of Venus jungle. I liked him and I trusted him. He contacted me in New York and he was very casual at first. We spent an evening here at the Red Lion, talking about old times; he told me about the Vulcan business, and how he’d been out to see Sanderson and the Twilight Lab on Mercury, and how he preferred a hot trek to a cold one any day of the year—and then he wanted to know what I’d been doing since Venus and what my plans were. “No particular plans,” I told him. “Why?” He looked me over. “How much do you weigh, Peter?” I told him one-thirty-five. “That much!” he said. “Well, there can’t be much fat on you, at any rate. How do you take heat?” “You should know,” I said. “Venus was no icebox.” “No, I mean real heat.” Then I began to get it. “You’re planning a trip.” “That’s right. A hot trip.” He grinned at me. “Might be dangerous, too.” “What trip?” “Brightside of Mercury,” the Major said. I whistled cautiously. “At aphelion?” He threw his head back. “Why try a Crossing at aphelion? What have you done then? Four thousand miles of butcherous heat, just to have some joker come along, use your data and drum you out of the glory by crossing at perihelion forty-four days later? No, thanks. I want the Brightside without any nonsense about it.” He leaned across me eagerly. “I want to make a Crossing at perihelion and I want to cross on the surface. If a man can do that, he’s got Mercury. Until then, nobody’s got Mercury. I want Mercury—but I’ll need help getting it.” I’d thought of it a thousand times and never dared consider it. Nobody had, since Wyatt and Carpenter disappeared. Mercury turns on its axis in the same time that it wheels around the Sun, which means that the Brightside is always facing in. That makes the Brightside of Mercury at perihelion the hottest place in the Solar System, with one single exception: the surface of the Sun itself. It would be a hellish trek. Only a few men had ever learned just how hellish and they never came back to tell about it. It was a real hell’s Crossing, but someday, I thought, somebody would cross it. I wanted to be along. The Twilight Lab, near the northern pole of Mercury, was the obvious jumping-off place. The setup there wasn’t very extensive—a rocket landing, the labs and quarters for Sanderson’s crew sunk deep into the crust, and the tower that housed the Solar ’scope that Sanderson had built up there ten years before. Twilight Lab wasn’t particularly interested in the Brightside, of course—the Sun was Sanderson’s baby and he’d picked Mercury as the closest chunk of rock to the Sun that could hold his observatory. He’d chosen a good location, too. On Mercury, the Brightside temperature hits 770° F. at perihelion and the Darkside runs pretty constant at -410° F. No permanent installation with a human crew could survive at either extreme. But with Mercury’s wobble, the twilight zone between Brightside and Darkside offers something closer to survival temperatures. Sanderson built the Lab up near the pole, where the zone is about five miles wide, so the temperature only varies 50 to 60 degrees with the libration. The Solar ’scope could take that much change and they’d get good clear observation of the Sun for about seventy out of the eighty-eight days it takes the planet to wheel around. The Major was counting on Sanderson knowing something about Mercury as well as the Sun when we camped at the Lab to make final preparations. Sanderson did. He thought we’d lost our minds and he said so, but he gave us all the help he could. He spent a week briefing Jack Stone, the third member of our party, who had arrived with the supplies and equipment a few days earlier. Poor Jack met us at the rocket landing almost bawling, Sanderson had given him such a gloomy picture of what Brightside was like. Stone was a youngster—hardly twenty-five, I’d say—but he’d been with the Major at Vulcan and had begged to join this trek. I had a funny feeling that Jack really didn’t care for exploring too much, but he thought Mikuta was God, followed him around like a puppy. It didn’t matter to me as long as he knew what he was getting in for. You don’t go asking people in this game why they do it—they’re liable to get awfully uneasy and none of them can ever give you an answer that makes sense. Anyway, Stone had borrowed three men from the Lab, and had the supplies and equipment all lined up when we got there, ready to check and test. We dug right in. With plenty of funds—tri-V money and some government cash the Major had talked his way around—our equipment was new and good. Mikuta had done the designing and testing himself, with a big assist from Sanderson. We had four Bugs, three of them the light pillow-tire models, with special lead-cooled cut-in engines when the heat set in, and one heavy-duty tractor model for pulling the sledges. The Major went over them like a kid at the circus. Then he said, “Have you heard anything from McIvers?” “Who’s he?” Stone wanted to know. “He’ll be joining us. He’s a good man—got quite a name for climbing, back home.” The Major turned to me. “You’ve probably heard of him.” I’d heard plenty of stories about Ted McIvers and I wasn’t too happy to hear that he was joining us. “Kind of a daredevil, isn’t he?” “Maybe. He’s lucky and skillful. Where do you draw the line? We’ll need plenty of both.” “Have you ever worked with him?” I asked. “No. Are you worried?” “Not exactly. But Brightside is no place to count on luck.” The Major laughed. “I don’t think we need to worry about McIvers. We understood each other when I talked up the trip to him and we’re going to need each other too much to do any fooling around.” He turned back to the supply list. “Meanwhile, let’s get this stuff listed and packed. We’ll need to cut weight sharply and our time is short. Sanderson says we should leave in three days.” Two days later, McIvers hadn’t arrived. The Major didn’t say much about it. Stone was getting edgy and so was I. We spent the second day studying charts of the Brightside, such as they were. The best available were pretty poor, taken from so far out that the detail dissolved into blurs on blow-up. They showed the biggest ranges of peaks and craters and faults, and that was all. Still, we could use them to plan a broad outline of our course. “This range here,” the Major said as we crowded around the board, “is largely inactive, according to Sanderson. But these to the south and west could be active. Seismograph tracings suggest a lot of activity in that region, getting worse down toward the equator—not only volcanic, but sub-surface shifting.” Stone nodded. “Sanderson told me there was probably constant surface activity.” The Major shrugged. “Well, it’s treacherous, there’s no doubt of it. But the only way to avoid it is to travel over the Pole, which would lose us days and offer us no guarantee of less activity to the west. Now we might avoid some if we could find a pass through this range and cut sharp east—” It seemed that the more we considered the problem, the further we got from a solution. We knew there were active volcanoes on the Brightside—even on the Darkside, though surface activity there was pretty much slowed down and localized. But there were problems of atmosphere on Brightside, as well. There was an atmosphere and a constant atmospheric flow from Brightside to Darkside. Not much—the lighter gases had reached escape velocity and disappeared from Brightside millennia ago—but there was CO 2 , and nitrogen, and traces of other heavier gases. There was also an abundance of sulfur vapor, as well as carbon disulfide and sulfur dioxide. The atmospheric tide moved toward the Darkside, where it condensed, carrying enough volcanic ash with it for Sanderson to estimate the depth and nature of the surface upheavals on Brightside from his samplings. The trick was to find a passage that avoided those upheavals as far as possible. But in the final analysis, we were barely scraping the surface. The only way we would find out what was happening where was to be there. Finally, on the third day, McIvers blew in on a freight rocket from Venus. He’d missed the ship that the Major and I had taken by a few hours, and had conned his way to Venus in hopes of getting a hop from there. He didn’t seem too upset about it, as though this were his usual way of doing things and he couldn’t see why everyone should get so excited. He was a tall, rangy man with long, wavy hair prematurely gray, and the sort of eyes that looked like a climber’s—half-closed, sleepy, almost indolent, but capable of abrupt alertness. And he never stood still; he was always moving, always doing something with his hands, or talking, or pacing about. Evidently the Major decided not to press the issue of his arrival. There was still work to do, and an hour later we were running the final tests on the pressure suits. That evening, Stone and McIvers were thick as thieves, and everything was set for an early departure after we got some rest. “And that,” said Baron, finishing his drink and signaling the waiter for another pair, “was your first big mistake.” Peter Claney raised his eyebrows. “McIvers?” “Of course.” Claney shrugged, glanced at the small quiet tables around them. “There are lots of bizarre personalities around a place like this, and some of the best wouldn’t seem to be the most reliable at first glance. Anyway, personality problems weren’t our big problem right then. Equipment worried us first and route next.” Baron nodded in agreement. “What kind of suits did you have?” “The best insulating suits ever made,” said Claney. “Each one had an inner lining of a fiberglass modification, to avoid the clumsiness of asbestos, and carried the refrigerating unit and oxygen storage which we recharged from the sledges every eight hours. Outer layer carried a monomolecular chrome reflecting surface that made us glitter like Christmas trees. And we had a half-inch dead-air space under positive pressure between the two layers. Warning thermocouples, of course—at 770 degrees, it wouldn’t take much time to fry us to cinders if the suits failed somewhere.” “How about the Bugs?” “They were insulated, too, but we weren’t counting on them too much for protection.” “You weren’t!” Baron exclaimed. “Why not?” “We’d be in and out of them too much. They gave us mobility and storage, but we knew we’d have to do a lot of forward work on foot.” Claney smiled bitterly. “Which meant that we had an inch of fiberglass and a half-inch of dead air between us and a surface temperature where lead flowed like water and zinc was almost at melting point and the pools of sulfur in the shadows were boiling like oatmeal over a campfire.” Baron licked his lips. His fingers stroked the cool, wet glass as he set it down on the tablecloth. “Go on,” he said tautly. “You started on schedule?” “Oh, yes,” said Claney, “we started on schedule, all right. We just didn’t quite end on schedule, that was all. But I’m getting to that.” He settled back in his chair and continued. We jumped off from Twilight on a course due southeast with thirty days to make it to the Center of Brightside. If we could cross an average of seventy miles a day, we could hit Center exactly at perihelion, the point of Mercury’s closest approach to the Sun—which made Center the hottest part of the planet at the hottest it ever gets. The Sun was already huge and yellow over the horizon when we started, twice the size it appears on Earth. Every day that Sun would grow bigger and whiter, and every day the surface would get hotter. But once we reached Center, the job was only half done—we would still have to travel another two thousand miles to the opposite twilight zone. Sanderson was to meet us on the other side in the Laboratory’s scout ship, approximately sixty days from the time we jumped off. That was the plan, in outline. It was up to us to cross those seventy miles a day, no matter how hot it became, no matter what terrain we had to cross. Detours would be dangerous and time-consuming. Delays could cost us our lives. We all knew that. The Major briefed us on details an hour before we left. “Peter, you’ll take the lead Bug, the small one we stripped down for you. Stone and I will flank you on either side, giving you a hundred-yard lead. McIvers, you’ll have the job of dragging the sledges, so we’ll have to direct your course pretty closely. Peter’s job is to pick the passage at any given point. If there’s any doubt of safe passage, we’ll all explore ahead on foot before we risk the Bugs. Got that?” McIvers and Stone exchanged glances. McIvers said: “Jack and I were planning to change around. We figured he could take the sledges. That would give me a little more mobility.” The Major looked up sharply at Stone. “Do you buy that, Jack?” Stone shrugged. “I don’t mind. Mac wanted—” McIvers made an impatient gesture with his hands. “It doesn’t matter. I just feel better when I’m on the move. Does it make any difference?” “I guess it doesn’t,” said the Major. “Then you’ll flank Peter along with me. Right?” “Sure, sure.” McIvers pulled at his lower lip. “Who’s going to do the advance scouting?” “It sounds like I am,” I cut in. “We want to keep the lead Bug light as possible.” Mikuta nodded. “That’s right. Peter’s Bug is stripped down to the frame and wheels.” McIvers shook his head. “No, I mean the advance work. You need somebody out ahead—four or five miles, at least—to pick up the big flaws and active surface changes, don’t you?” He stared at the Major. “I mean, how can we tell what sort of a hole we may be moving into, unless we have a scout up ahead?” “That’s what we have the charts for,” the Major said sharply. “Charts! I’m talking about detail work. We don’t need to worry about the major topography. It’s the little faults you can’t see on the pictures that can kill us.” He tossed the charts down excitedly. “Look, let me take a Bug out ahead and work reconnaissance, keep five, maybe ten miles ahead of the column. I can stay on good solid ground, of course, but scan the area closely and radio back to Peter where to avoid the flaws. Then—” “No dice,” the Major broke in. “But why not? We could save ourselves days!” “I don’t care what we could save. We stay together. When we get to the Center, I want live men along with me. That means we stay within easy sight of each other at all times. Any climber knows that everybody is safer in a party than one man alone—any time, any place.” McIvers stared at him, his cheeks an angry red. Finally he gave a sullen nod. “Okay. If you say so.” “Well, I say so and I mean it. I don’t want any fancy stuff. We’re going to hit Center together, and finish the Crossing together. Got that?” McIvers nodded. Mikuta then looked at Stone and me and we nodded, too. “All right,” he said slowly. “Now that we’ve got it straight, let’s go.” It was hot. If I forget everything else about that trek, I’ll never forget that huge yellow Sun glaring down, without a break, hotter and hotter with every mile. We knew that the first few days would be the easiest and we were rested and fresh when we started down the long ragged gorge southeast of the Twilight Lab. I moved out first; back over my shoulder, I could see the Major and McIvers crawling out behind me, their pillow tires taking the rugged floor of the gorge smoothly. Behind them, Stone dragged the sledges. Even at only 30 per cent Earth gravity they were a strain on the big tractor, until the ski-blades bit into the fluffy volcanic ash blanketing the valley. We even had a path to follow for the first twenty miles. I kept my eyes pasted to the big polaroid binocs, picking out the track the early research teams had made out into the edge of Brightside. But in a couple of hours we rumbled past Sanderson’s little outpost observatory and the tracks stopped. We were in virgin territory and already the Sun was beginning to bite. We didn’t feel the heat so much those first days out. We saw it. The refrig units kept our skins at a nice comfortable seventy-five degrees Fahrenheit inside our suits, but our eyes watched that glaring Sun and the baked yellow rocks going past, and some nerve pathways got twisted up, somehow. We poured sweat as if we were in a superheated furnace. We drove eight hours and slept five. When a sleep period came due, we pulled the Bugs together into a square, threw up a light aluminum sun-shield and lay out in the dust and rocks. The sun-shield cut the temperature down sixty or seventy degrees, for whatever help that was. And then we ate from the forward sledge—sucking through tubes—protein, carbohydrates, bulk gelatin, vitamins. The Major measured water out with an iron hand, because we’d have drunk ourselves into nephritis in a week otherwise. We were constantly, unceasingly thirsty. Ask the physiologists and psychiatrists why—they can give you have a dozen interesting reasons—but all we knew, or cared about, was that it happened to be so. We didn’t sleep the first few stops, as a consequence. Our eyes burned in spite of the filters and we had roaring headaches, but we couldn’t sleep them off. We sat around looking at each other. Then McIvers would say how good a beer would taste, and off we’d go. We’d have murdered our grandmothers for one ice-cold bottle of beer. After a few driving periods, I began to get my bearings at the wheel. We were moving down into desolation that made Earth’s old Death Valley look like a Japanese rose garden. Huge sun-baked cracks opened up in the floor of the gorge, with black cliffs jutting up on either side; the air was filled with a barely visible yellowish mist of sulfur and sulfurous gases. It was a hot, barren hole, no place for any man to go, but the challenge was so powerful you could almost feel it. No one had ever crossed this land before and escaped. Those who had tried it had been cruelly punished, but the land was still there, so it had to be crossed. Not the easy way. It had to be crossed the hardest way possible: overland, through anything the land could throw up to us, at the most difficult time possible. Yet we knew that even the land might have been conquered before, except for that Sun. We’d fought absolute cold before and won. We’d never fought heat like this and won. The only worse heat in the Solar System was the surface of the Sun itself. Brightside was worth trying for. We would get it or it would get us. That was the bargain. I learned a lot about Mercury those first few driving periods. The gorge petered out after a hundred miles and we moved onto the slope of a range of ragged craters that ran south and east. This range had shown no activity since the first landing on Mercury forty years before, but beyond it there were active cones. Yellow fumes rose from the craters constantly; their sides were shrouded with heavy ash. We couldn’t detect a wind, but we knew there was a hot, sulfurous breeze sweeping in great continental tides across the face of the planet. Not enough for erosion, though. The craters rose up out of jagged gorges, huge towering spears of rock and rubble. Below were the vast yellow flatlands, smoking and hissing from the gases beneath the crust. Over everything was gray dust—silicates and salts, pumice and limestone and granite ash, filling crevices and declivities—offering a soft, treacherous surface for the Bug’s pillow tires. I learned to read the ground, to tell a covered fault by the sag of the dust; I learned to spot a passable crack, and tell it from an impassable cut. Time after time the Bugs ground to a halt while we explored a passage on foot, tied together with light copper cable, digging, advancing, digging some more until we were sure the surface would carry the machines. It was cruel work; we slept in exhaustion. But it went smoothly, at first. Too smoothly, it seemed to me, and the others seemed to think so, too. McIvers’ restlessness was beginning to grate on our nerves. He talked too much, while we were resting or while we were driving; wisecracks, witticisms, unfunny jokes that wore thin with repetition. He took to making side trips from the route now and then, never far, but a little further each time. Jack Stone reacted quite the opposite; he grew quieter with each stop, more reserved and apprehensive. I didn’t like it, but I figured that it would pass off after a while. I was apprehensive enough myself; I just managed to hide it better. And every mile the Sun got bigger and whiter and higher in the sky and hotter. Without our ultra-violet screens and glare filters we would have been blinded; as it was our eyes ached constantly and the skin on our faces itched and tingled at the end of an eight-hour trek. But it took one of those side trips of McIvers’ to deliver the penultimate blow to our already fraying nerves. He had driven down a side-branch of a long canyon running off west of our route and was almost out of sight in a cloud of ash when we heard a sharp cry through our earphones. I wheeled my Bug around with my heart in my throat and spotted him through the binocs, waving frantically from the top of his machine. The Major and I took off, lumbering down the gulch after him as fast as the Bugs could go, with a thousand horrible pictures racing through our minds.... We found him standing stock-still, pointing down the gorge and, for once, he didn’t have anything to say. It was the wreck of a Bug; an old-fashioned half-track model of the sort that hadn’t been in use for years. It was wedged tight in a cut in the rock, an axle broken, its casing split wide open up the middle, half-buried in a rock slide. A dozen feet away were two insulated suits with white bones gleaming through the fiberglass helmets. This was as far as Wyatt and Carpenter had gotten on their Brightside Crossing. On the fifth driving period out, the terrain began to change. It looked the same, but every now and then it felt different. On two occasions I felt my wheels spin, with a howl of protest from my engine. Then, quite suddenly, the Bug gave a lurch; I gunned my motor and nothing happened. I could see the dull gray stuff seeping up around the hubs, thick and tenacious, splattering around in steaming gobs as the wheels spun. I knew what had happened the moment the wheels gave and, a few minutes later, they chained me to the tractor and dragged me back out of the mire. It looked for all the world like thick gray mud, but it was a pit of molten lead, steaming under a soft layer of concealing ash. I picked my way more cautiously then. We were getting into an area of recent surface activity; the surface was really treacherous. I caught myself wishing that the Major had okayed McIvers’ scheme for an advanced scout; more dangerous for the individual, maybe, but I was driving blind now and I didn’t like it. One error in judgment could sink us all, but I wasn’t thinking much about the others. I was worried about me , plenty worried. I kept thinking, better McIvers should go than me. It wasn’t healthy thinking and I knew it, but I couldn’t get the thought out of my mind. It was a grueling eight hours and we slept poorly. Back in the Bug again, we moved still more slowly—edging out on a broad flat plateau, dodging a network of gaping surface cracks—winding back and forth in an effort to keep the machines on solid rock. I couldn’t see far ahead, because of the yellow haze rising from the cracks, so I was almost on top of it when I saw a sharp cut ahead where the surface dropped six feet beyond a deep crack. I let out a shout to halt the others; then I edged my Bug forward, peering at the cleft. It was deep and wide. I moved fifty yards to the left, then back to the right. There was only one place that looked like a possible crossing; a long, narrow ledge of gray stuff that lay down across a section of the fault like a ramp. Even as I watched it, I could feel the surface crust under the Bug trembling and saw the ledge shift over a few feet.

Who is McIvers, and what happens to him throughout the story?

9

McIvers is a climbing enthusiast who is known as something of a daredevil, and is described by Mikuta as possessing skill and luck. Claney describes him as tall, with long, wavy, prematurely graying hair and “climber’s” eyes that can look drowsy or suddenly very alert. He never stands still and is always speaking, moving, or doing something. He has been invited on the Brightside Crossing mission, unbeknownst to Peter Claney, by Major Mikuta. He casually shows up three days late, having missed the ship that Claney and Mikuta took and conned his way into a different route via Venus. On the eve of the mission, as plans are being doled out, he asserts that he thinks he and Jack Stone should switch roles and he should be given more leeway for movement. He asks if he can go several miles ahead of the rest to scout out the terrain, but Mikuta insists that they will all stay together. McIvers shows his hot temper during this exchange but ultimately agrees. He grows restless during the journey and annoys everyone with his constant talking and wandering. Because of his meandering, he is the first to encounter a chilling sight: the bodies of Wyatt and Carpenter, the first two explorers to attempt the Brightside Crossing.

49165

Brightside Crossing by Alan E. Nourse JAMES BARON was not pleased to hear that he had had a visitor when he reached the Red Lion that evening. He had no stomach for mysteries, vast or trifling, and there were pressing things to think about at this time. Yet the doorman had flagged him as he came in from the street: “A thousand pardons, Mr. Baron. The gentleman—he would leave no name. He said you’d want to see him. He will be back by eight.” Now Baron drummed his fingers on the table top, staring about the quiet lounge. Street trade was discouraged at the Red Lion, gently but persuasively; the patrons were few in number. Across to the right was a group that Baron knew vaguely—Andean climbers, or at least two of them were. Over near the door he recognized old Balmer, who had mapped the first passage to the core of Vulcan Crater on Venus. Baron returned his smile with a nod. Then he settled back and waited impatiently for the intruder who demanded his time without justifying it. Presently a small, grizzled man crossed the room and sat down at Baron’s table. He was short and wiry. His face held no key to his age—he might have been thirty or a thousand—but he looked weary and immensely ugly. His cheeks and forehead were twisted and brown, with scars that were still healing. The stranger said, “I’m glad you waited. I’ve heard you’re planning to attempt the Brightside.” Baron stared at the man for a moment. “I see you can read telecasts,” he said coldly. “The news was correct. We are going to make a Brightside Crossing.” “At perihelion?” “Of course. When else?” The grizzled man searched Baron’s face for a moment without expression. Then he said slowly, “No, I’m afraid you’re not going to make the Crossing.” “Say, who are you, if you don’t mind?” Baron demanded. “The name is Claney,” said the stranger. There was a silence. Then: “Claney? Peter Claney?” “That’s right.” Baron’s eyes were wide with excitement, all trace of anger gone. “Great balls of fire, man— where have you been hiding? We’ve been trying to contact you for months!” “I know. I was hoping you’d quit looking and chuck the whole idea.” “Quit looking!” Baron bent forward over the table. “My friend, we’d given up hope, but we’ve never quit looking. Here, have a drink. There’s so much you can tell us.” His fingers were trembling. Peter Claney shook his head. “I can’t tell you anything you want to hear.” “But you’ve got to. You’re the only man on Earth who’s attempted a Brightside Crossing and lived through it! And the story you cleared for the news—it was nothing. We need details . Where did your equipment fall down? Where did you miscalculate? What were the trouble spots?” Baron jabbed a finger at Claney’s face. “That, for instance—epithelioma? Why? What was wrong with your glass? Your filters? We’ve got to know those things. If you can tell us, we can make it across where your attempt failed—” “You want to know why we failed?” asked Claney. “Of course we want to know. We have to know.” “It’s simple. We failed because it can’t be done. We couldn’t do it and neither can you. No human beings will ever cross the Brightside alive, not if they try for centuries.” “Nonsense,” Baron declared. “We will.” Claney shrugged. “I was there. I know what I’m saying. You can blame the equipment or the men—there were flaws in both quarters—but we just didn’t know what we were fighting. It was the planet that whipped us, that and the Sun . They’ll whip you, too, if you try it.” “Never,” said Baron. “Let me tell you,” Peter Claney said. I’d been interested in the Brightside for almost as long as I can remember (Claney said). I guess I was about ten when Wyatt and Carpenter made the last attempt—that was in 2082, I think. I followed the news stories like a tri-V serial and then I was heartbroken when they just disappeared. I know now that they were a pair of idiots, starting off without proper equipment, with practically no knowledge of surface conditions, without any charts—they couldn’t have made a hundred miles—but I didn’t know that then and it was a terrible tragedy. After that, I followed Sanderson’s work in the Twilight Lab up there and began to get Brightside into my blood, sure as death. But it was Mikuta’s idea to attempt a Crossing. Did you ever know Tom Mikuta? I don’t suppose you did. No, not Japanese—Polish-American. He was a major in the Interplanetary Service for some years and hung onto the title after he gave up his commission. He was with Armstrong on Mars during his Service days, did a good deal of the original mapping and surveying for the Colony there. I first met him on Venus; we spent five years together up there doing some of the nastiest exploring since the Matto Grasso. Then he made the attempt on Vulcan Crater that paved the way for Balmer a few years later. I’d always liked the Major—he was big and quiet and cool, the sort of guy who always had things figured a little further ahead than anyone else and always knew what to do in a tight place. Too many men in this game are all nerve and luck, with no judgment. The Major had both. He also had the kind of personality that could take a crew of wild men and make them work like a well-oiled machine across a thousand miles of Venus jungle. I liked him and I trusted him. He contacted me in New York and he was very casual at first. We spent an evening here at the Red Lion, talking about old times; he told me about the Vulcan business, and how he’d been out to see Sanderson and the Twilight Lab on Mercury, and how he preferred a hot trek to a cold one any day of the year—and then he wanted to know what I’d been doing since Venus and what my plans were. “No particular plans,” I told him. “Why?” He looked me over. “How much do you weigh, Peter?” I told him one-thirty-five. “That much!” he said. “Well, there can’t be much fat on you, at any rate. How do you take heat?” “You should know,” I said. “Venus was no icebox.” “No, I mean real heat.” Then I began to get it. “You’re planning a trip.” “That’s right. A hot trip.” He grinned at me. “Might be dangerous, too.” “What trip?” “Brightside of Mercury,” the Major said. I whistled cautiously. “At aphelion?” He threw his head back. “Why try a Crossing at aphelion? What have you done then? Four thousand miles of butcherous heat, just to have some joker come along, use your data and drum you out of the glory by crossing at perihelion forty-four days later? No, thanks. I want the Brightside without any nonsense about it.” He leaned across me eagerly. “I want to make a Crossing at perihelion and I want to cross on the surface. If a man can do that, he’s got Mercury. Until then, nobody’s got Mercury. I want Mercury—but I’ll need help getting it.” I’d thought of it a thousand times and never dared consider it. Nobody had, since Wyatt and Carpenter disappeared. Mercury turns on its axis in the same time that it wheels around the Sun, which means that the Brightside is always facing in. That makes the Brightside of Mercury at perihelion the hottest place in the Solar System, with one single exception: the surface of the Sun itself. It would be a hellish trek. Only a few men had ever learned just how hellish and they never came back to tell about it. It was a real hell’s Crossing, but someday, I thought, somebody would cross it. I wanted to be along. The Twilight Lab, near the northern pole of Mercury, was the obvious jumping-off place. The setup there wasn’t very extensive—a rocket landing, the labs and quarters for Sanderson’s crew sunk deep into the crust, and the tower that housed the Solar ’scope that Sanderson had built up there ten years before. Twilight Lab wasn’t particularly interested in the Brightside, of course—the Sun was Sanderson’s baby and he’d picked Mercury as the closest chunk of rock to the Sun that could hold his observatory. He’d chosen a good location, too. On Mercury, the Brightside temperature hits 770° F. at perihelion and the Darkside runs pretty constant at -410° F. No permanent installation with a human crew could survive at either extreme. But with Mercury’s wobble, the twilight zone between Brightside and Darkside offers something closer to survival temperatures. Sanderson built the Lab up near the pole, where the zone is about five miles wide, so the temperature only varies 50 to 60 degrees with the libration. The Solar ’scope could take that much change and they’d get good clear observation of the Sun for about seventy out of the eighty-eight days it takes the planet to wheel around. The Major was counting on Sanderson knowing something about Mercury as well as the Sun when we camped at the Lab to make final preparations. Sanderson did. He thought we’d lost our minds and he said so, but he gave us all the help he could. He spent a week briefing Jack Stone, the third member of our party, who had arrived with the supplies and equipment a few days earlier. Poor Jack met us at the rocket landing almost bawling, Sanderson had given him such a gloomy picture of what Brightside was like. Stone was a youngster—hardly twenty-five, I’d say—but he’d been with the Major at Vulcan and had begged to join this trek. I had a funny feeling that Jack really didn’t care for exploring too much, but he thought Mikuta was God, followed him around like a puppy. It didn’t matter to me as long as he knew what he was getting in for. You don’t go asking people in this game why they do it—they’re liable to get awfully uneasy and none of them can ever give you an answer that makes sense. Anyway, Stone had borrowed three men from the Lab, and had the supplies and equipment all lined up when we got there, ready to check and test. We dug right in. With plenty of funds—tri-V money and some government cash the Major had talked his way around—our equipment was new and good. Mikuta had done the designing and testing himself, with a big assist from Sanderson. We had four Bugs, three of them the light pillow-tire models, with special lead-cooled cut-in engines when the heat set in, and one heavy-duty tractor model for pulling the sledges. The Major went over them like a kid at the circus. Then he said, “Have you heard anything from McIvers?” “Who’s he?” Stone wanted to know. “He’ll be joining us. He’s a good man—got quite a name for climbing, back home.” The Major turned to me. “You’ve probably heard of him.” I’d heard plenty of stories about Ted McIvers and I wasn’t too happy to hear that he was joining us. “Kind of a daredevil, isn’t he?” “Maybe. He’s lucky and skillful. Where do you draw the line? We’ll need plenty of both.” “Have you ever worked with him?” I asked. “No. Are you worried?” “Not exactly. But Brightside is no place to count on luck.” The Major laughed. “I don’t think we need to worry about McIvers. We understood each other when I talked up the trip to him and we’re going to need each other too much to do any fooling around.” He turned back to the supply list. “Meanwhile, let’s get this stuff listed and packed. We’ll need to cut weight sharply and our time is short. Sanderson says we should leave in three days.” Two days later, McIvers hadn’t arrived. The Major didn’t say much about it. Stone was getting edgy and so was I. We spent the second day studying charts of the Brightside, such as they were. The best available were pretty poor, taken from so far out that the detail dissolved into blurs on blow-up. They showed the biggest ranges of peaks and craters and faults, and that was all. Still, we could use them to plan a broad outline of our course. “This range here,” the Major said as we crowded around the board, “is largely inactive, according to Sanderson. But these to the south and west could be active. Seismograph tracings suggest a lot of activity in that region, getting worse down toward the equator—not only volcanic, but sub-surface shifting.” Stone nodded. “Sanderson told me there was probably constant surface activity.” The Major shrugged. “Well, it’s treacherous, there’s no doubt of it. But the only way to avoid it is to travel over the Pole, which would lose us days and offer us no guarantee of less activity to the west. Now we might avoid some if we could find a pass through this range and cut sharp east—” It seemed that the more we considered the problem, the further we got from a solution. We knew there were active volcanoes on the Brightside—even on the Darkside, though surface activity there was pretty much slowed down and localized. But there were problems of atmosphere on Brightside, as well. There was an atmosphere and a constant atmospheric flow from Brightside to Darkside. Not much—the lighter gases had reached escape velocity and disappeared from Brightside millennia ago—but there was CO 2 , and nitrogen, and traces of other heavier gases. There was also an abundance of sulfur vapor, as well as carbon disulfide and sulfur dioxide. The atmospheric tide moved toward the Darkside, where it condensed, carrying enough volcanic ash with it for Sanderson to estimate the depth and nature of the surface upheavals on Brightside from his samplings. The trick was to find a passage that avoided those upheavals as far as possible. But in the final analysis, we were barely scraping the surface. The only way we would find out what was happening where was to be there. Finally, on the third day, McIvers blew in on a freight rocket from Venus. He’d missed the ship that the Major and I had taken by a few hours, and had conned his way to Venus in hopes of getting a hop from there. He didn’t seem too upset about it, as though this were his usual way of doing things and he couldn’t see why everyone should get so excited. He was a tall, rangy man with long, wavy hair prematurely gray, and the sort of eyes that looked like a climber’s—half-closed, sleepy, almost indolent, but capable of abrupt alertness. And he never stood still; he was always moving, always doing something with his hands, or talking, or pacing about. Evidently the Major decided not to press the issue of his arrival. There was still work to do, and an hour later we were running the final tests on the pressure suits. That evening, Stone and McIvers were thick as thieves, and everything was set for an early departure after we got some rest. “And that,” said Baron, finishing his drink and signaling the waiter for another pair, “was your first big mistake.” Peter Claney raised his eyebrows. “McIvers?” “Of course.” Claney shrugged, glanced at the small quiet tables around them. “There are lots of bizarre personalities around a place like this, and some of the best wouldn’t seem to be the most reliable at first glance. Anyway, personality problems weren’t our big problem right then. Equipment worried us first and route next.” Baron nodded in agreement. “What kind of suits did you have?” “The best insulating suits ever made,” said Claney. “Each one had an inner lining of a fiberglass modification, to avoid the clumsiness of asbestos, and carried the refrigerating unit and oxygen storage which we recharged from the sledges every eight hours. Outer layer carried a monomolecular chrome reflecting surface that made us glitter like Christmas trees. And we had a half-inch dead-air space under positive pressure between the two layers. Warning thermocouples, of course—at 770 degrees, it wouldn’t take much time to fry us to cinders if the suits failed somewhere.” “How about the Bugs?” “They were insulated, too, but we weren’t counting on them too much for protection.” “You weren’t!” Baron exclaimed. “Why not?” “We’d be in and out of them too much. They gave us mobility and storage, but we knew we’d have to do a lot of forward work on foot.” Claney smiled bitterly. “Which meant that we had an inch of fiberglass and a half-inch of dead air between us and a surface temperature where lead flowed like water and zinc was almost at melting point and the pools of sulfur in the shadows were boiling like oatmeal over a campfire.” Baron licked his lips. His fingers stroked the cool, wet glass as he set it down on the tablecloth. “Go on,” he said tautly. “You started on schedule?” “Oh, yes,” said Claney, “we started on schedule, all right. We just didn’t quite end on schedule, that was all. But I’m getting to that.” He settled back in his chair and continued. We jumped off from Twilight on a course due southeast with thirty days to make it to the Center of Brightside. If we could cross an average of seventy miles a day, we could hit Center exactly at perihelion, the point of Mercury’s closest approach to the Sun—which made Center the hottest part of the planet at the hottest it ever gets. The Sun was already huge and yellow over the horizon when we started, twice the size it appears on Earth. Every day that Sun would grow bigger and whiter, and every day the surface would get hotter. But once we reached Center, the job was only half done—we would still have to travel another two thousand miles to the opposite twilight zone. Sanderson was to meet us on the other side in the Laboratory’s scout ship, approximately sixty days from the time we jumped off. That was the plan, in outline. It was up to us to cross those seventy miles a day, no matter how hot it became, no matter what terrain we had to cross. Detours would be dangerous and time-consuming. Delays could cost us our lives. We all knew that. The Major briefed us on details an hour before we left. “Peter, you’ll take the lead Bug, the small one we stripped down for you. Stone and I will flank you on either side, giving you a hundred-yard lead. McIvers, you’ll have the job of dragging the sledges, so we’ll have to direct your course pretty closely. Peter’s job is to pick the passage at any given point. If there’s any doubt of safe passage, we’ll all explore ahead on foot before we risk the Bugs. Got that?” McIvers and Stone exchanged glances. McIvers said: “Jack and I were planning to change around. We figured he could take the sledges. That would give me a little more mobility.” The Major looked up sharply at Stone. “Do you buy that, Jack?” Stone shrugged. “I don’t mind. Mac wanted—” McIvers made an impatient gesture with his hands. “It doesn’t matter. I just feel better when I’m on the move. Does it make any difference?” “I guess it doesn’t,” said the Major. “Then you’ll flank Peter along with me. Right?” “Sure, sure.” McIvers pulled at his lower lip. “Who’s going to do the advance scouting?” “It sounds like I am,” I cut in. “We want to keep the lead Bug light as possible.” Mikuta nodded. “That’s right. Peter’s Bug is stripped down to the frame and wheels.” McIvers shook his head. “No, I mean the advance work. You need somebody out ahead—four or five miles, at least—to pick up the big flaws and active surface changes, don’t you?” He stared at the Major. “I mean, how can we tell what sort of a hole we may be moving into, unless we have a scout up ahead?” “That’s what we have the charts for,” the Major said sharply. “Charts! I’m talking about detail work. We don’t need to worry about the major topography. It’s the little faults you can’t see on the pictures that can kill us.” He tossed the charts down excitedly. “Look, let me take a Bug out ahead and work reconnaissance, keep five, maybe ten miles ahead of the column. I can stay on good solid ground, of course, but scan the area closely and radio back to Peter where to avoid the flaws. Then—” “No dice,” the Major broke in. “But why not? We could save ourselves days!” “I don’t care what we could save. We stay together. When we get to the Center, I want live men along with me. That means we stay within easy sight of each other at all times. Any climber knows that everybody is safer in a party than one man alone—any time, any place.” McIvers stared at him, his cheeks an angry red. Finally he gave a sullen nod. “Okay. If you say so.” “Well, I say so and I mean it. I don’t want any fancy stuff. We’re going to hit Center together, and finish the Crossing together. Got that?” McIvers nodded. Mikuta then looked at Stone and me and we nodded, too. “All right,” he said slowly. “Now that we’ve got it straight, let’s go.” It was hot. If I forget everything else about that trek, I’ll never forget that huge yellow Sun glaring down, without a break, hotter and hotter with every mile. We knew that the first few days would be the easiest and we were rested and fresh when we started down the long ragged gorge southeast of the Twilight Lab. I moved out first; back over my shoulder, I could see the Major and McIvers crawling out behind me, their pillow tires taking the rugged floor of the gorge smoothly. Behind them, Stone dragged the sledges. Even at only 30 per cent Earth gravity they were a strain on the big tractor, until the ski-blades bit into the fluffy volcanic ash blanketing the valley. We even had a path to follow for the first twenty miles. I kept my eyes pasted to the big polaroid binocs, picking out the track the early research teams had made out into the edge of Brightside. But in a couple of hours we rumbled past Sanderson’s little outpost observatory and the tracks stopped. We were in virgin territory and already the Sun was beginning to bite. We didn’t feel the heat so much those first days out. We saw it. The refrig units kept our skins at a nice comfortable seventy-five degrees Fahrenheit inside our suits, but our eyes watched that glaring Sun and the baked yellow rocks going past, and some nerve pathways got twisted up, somehow. We poured sweat as if we were in a superheated furnace. We drove eight hours and slept five. When a sleep period came due, we pulled the Bugs together into a square, threw up a light aluminum sun-shield and lay out in the dust and rocks. The sun-shield cut the temperature down sixty or seventy degrees, for whatever help that was. And then we ate from the forward sledge—sucking through tubes—protein, carbohydrates, bulk gelatin, vitamins. The Major measured water out with an iron hand, because we’d have drunk ourselves into nephritis in a week otherwise. We were constantly, unceasingly thirsty. Ask the physiologists and psychiatrists why—they can give you have a dozen interesting reasons—but all we knew, or cared about, was that it happened to be so. We didn’t sleep the first few stops, as a consequence. Our eyes burned in spite of the filters and we had roaring headaches, but we couldn’t sleep them off. We sat around looking at each other. Then McIvers would say how good a beer would taste, and off we’d go. We’d have murdered our grandmothers for one ice-cold bottle of beer. After a few driving periods, I began to get my bearings at the wheel. We were moving down into desolation that made Earth’s old Death Valley look like a Japanese rose garden. Huge sun-baked cracks opened up in the floor of the gorge, with black cliffs jutting up on either side; the air was filled with a barely visible yellowish mist of sulfur and sulfurous gases. It was a hot, barren hole, no place for any man to go, but the challenge was so powerful you could almost feel it. No one had ever crossed this land before and escaped. Those who had tried it had been cruelly punished, but the land was still there, so it had to be crossed. Not the easy way. It had to be crossed the hardest way possible: overland, through anything the land could throw up to us, at the most difficult time possible. Yet we knew that even the land might have been conquered before, except for that Sun. We’d fought absolute cold before and won. We’d never fought heat like this and won. The only worse heat in the Solar System was the surface of the Sun itself. Brightside was worth trying for. We would get it or it would get us. That was the bargain. I learned a lot about Mercury those first few driving periods. The gorge petered out after a hundred miles and we moved onto the slope of a range of ragged craters that ran south and east. This range had shown no activity since the first landing on Mercury forty years before, but beyond it there were active cones. Yellow fumes rose from the craters constantly; their sides were shrouded with heavy ash. We couldn’t detect a wind, but we knew there was a hot, sulfurous breeze sweeping in great continental tides across the face of the planet. Not enough for erosion, though. The craters rose up out of jagged gorges, huge towering spears of rock and rubble. Below were the vast yellow flatlands, smoking and hissing from the gases beneath the crust. Over everything was gray dust—silicates and salts, pumice and limestone and granite ash, filling crevices and declivities—offering a soft, treacherous surface for the Bug’s pillow tires. I learned to read the ground, to tell a covered fault by the sag of the dust; I learned to spot a passable crack, and tell it from an impassable cut. Time after time the Bugs ground to a halt while we explored a passage on foot, tied together with light copper cable, digging, advancing, digging some more until we were sure the surface would carry the machines. It was cruel work; we slept in exhaustion. But it went smoothly, at first. Too smoothly, it seemed to me, and the others seemed to think so, too. McIvers’ restlessness was beginning to grate on our nerves. He talked too much, while we were resting or while we were driving; wisecracks, witticisms, unfunny jokes that wore thin with repetition. He took to making side trips from the route now and then, never far, but a little further each time. Jack Stone reacted quite the opposite; he grew quieter with each stop, more reserved and apprehensive. I didn’t like it, but I figured that it would pass off after a while. I was apprehensive enough myself; I just managed to hide it better. And every mile the Sun got bigger and whiter and higher in the sky and hotter. Without our ultra-violet screens and glare filters we would have been blinded; as it was our eyes ached constantly and the skin on our faces itched and tingled at the end of an eight-hour trek. But it took one of those side trips of McIvers’ to deliver the penultimate blow to our already fraying nerves. He had driven down a side-branch of a long canyon running off west of our route and was almost out of sight in a cloud of ash when we heard a sharp cry through our earphones. I wheeled my Bug around with my heart in my throat and spotted him through the binocs, waving frantically from the top of his machine. The Major and I took off, lumbering down the gulch after him as fast as the Bugs could go, with a thousand horrible pictures racing through our minds.... We found him standing stock-still, pointing down the gorge and, for once, he didn’t have anything to say. It was the wreck of a Bug; an old-fashioned half-track model of the sort that hadn’t been in use for years. It was wedged tight in a cut in the rock, an axle broken, its casing split wide open up the middle, half-buried in a rock slide. A dozen feet away were two insulated suits with white bones gleaming through the fiberglass helmets. This was as far as Wyatt and Carpenter had gotten on their Brightside Crossing. On the fifth driving period out, the terrain began to change. It looked the same, but every now and then it felt different. On two occasions I felt my wheels spin, with a howl of protest from my engine. Then, quite suddenly, the Bug gave a lurch; I gunned my motor and nothing happened. I could see the dull gray stuff seeping up around the hubs, thick and tenacious, splattering around in steaming gobs as the wheels spun. I knew what had happened the moment the wheels gave and, a few minutes later, they chained me to the tractor and dragged me back out of the mire. It looked for all the world like thick gray mud, but it was a pit of molten lead, steaming under a soft layer of concealing ash. I picked my way more cautiously then. We were getting into an area of recent surface activity; the surface was really treacherous. I caught myself wishing that the Major had okayed McIvers’ scheme for an advanced scout; more dangerous for the individual, maybe, but I was driving blind now and I didn’t like it. One error in judgment could sink us all, but I wasn’t thinking much about the others. I was worried about me , plenty worried. I kept thinking, better McIvers should go than me. It wasn’t healthy thinking and I knew it, but I couldn’t get the thought out of my mind. It was a grueling eight hours and we slept poorly. Back in the Bug again, we moved still more slowly—edging out on a broad flat plateau, dodging a network of gaping surface cracks—winding back and forth in an effort to keep the machines on solid rock. I couldn’t see far ahead, because of the yellow haze rising from the cracks, so I was almost on top of it when I saw a sharp cut ahead where the surface dropped six feet beyond a deep crack. I let out a shout to halt the others; then I edged my Bug forward, peering at the cleft. It was deep and wide. I moved fifty yards to the left, then back to the right. There was only one place that looked like a possible crossing; a long, narrow ledge of gray stuff that lay down across a section of the fault like a ramp. Even as I watched it, I could feel the surface crust under the Bug trembling and saw the ledge shift over a few feet.

Who is McIvers, and what happens to him throughout the story?

1

McIvers is an excellent climber with long gray hair and sleepy eyes. He is fidgety and difficult to take seriously. Major Tom Mikuta invites Ted McIvers to join the team on their mission to cross the Brightside of Mercury, and Peter Claney is immediately disappointed. McIvers has a reputation for being a daredevil, and Claney worries that he’s incapable of taking the danger of the mission seriously. Major argues that McIvers is both lucky and skillful, and the team will need plenty of luck and skill on this difficult trip. He also explains that McIvers knows that fooling around is unacceptable. When Claney tells James Baron the story of his trip, Baron agrees that taking McIvers was a huge mistake. Claney tells him that actually, the equipment and the route were more worrisome than McIvers. McIvers arrives late to The Twilight Lab, but Major doesn’t chide him. He actually shows up on a freight rocket from Venus because he missed his original chance to get on the ship that Major and Claney took. Major, the leader of the pack, tells McIvers that he will be dragging the sledges, but McIvers tells his boss that he and Jack Stone have already decided to switch roles. He clearly has no issue with challenging authority, and he gets his way. However, McIvers also wants to know who will be miles ahead of the group scouting the terrain, and Major tells him that no one will take that role. Everyone is to remain in sight of one another. Later, Claney reveals that McIvers was right about this suggestion. It would have been incredibly helpful to have a scout out ahead so the team wasn’t driving blind. McIvers’ constant talking really annoys Claney and perhaps the other team members as well. He tells the same stupid jokes over and over and repeatedly wishes he had a cold beer. He also begins to go further and further away from the rest of the group members. On one of these tangents, McIvers spots the bodies of Wyatt and Carpenter, two explorers who failed at their mission to cross The Brightside.

49165

Brightside Crossing by Alan E. Nourse JAMES BARON was not pleased to hear that he had had a visitor when he reached the Red Lion that evening. He had no stomach for mysteries, vast or trifling, and there were pressing things to think about at this time. Yet the doorman had flagged him as he came in from the street: “A thousand pardons, Mr. Baron. The gentleman—he would leave no name. He said you’d want to see him. He will be back by eight.” Now Baron drummed his fingers on the table top, staring about the quiet lounge. Street trade was discouraged at the Red Lion, gently but persuasively; the patrons were few in number. Across to the right was a group that Baron knew vaguely—Andean climbers, or at least two of them were. Over near the door he recognized old Balmer, who had mapped the first passage to the core of Vulcan Crater on Venus. Baron returned his smile with a nod. Then he settled back and waited impatiently for the intruder who demanded his time without justifying it. Presently a small, grizzled man crossed the room and sat down at Baron’s table. He was short and wiry. His face held no key to his age—he might have been thirty or a thousand—but he looked weary and immensely ugly. His cheeks and forehead were twisted and brown, with scars that were still healing. The stranger said, “I’m glad you waited. I’ve heard you’re planning to attempt the Brightside.” Baron stared at the man for a moment. “I see you can read telecasts,” he said coldly. “The news was correct. We are going to make a Brightside Crossing.” “At perihelion?” “Of course. When else?” The grizzled man searched Baron’s face for a moment without expression. Then he said slowly, “No, I’m afraid you’re not going to make the Crossing.” “Say, who are you, if you don’t mind?” Baron demanded. “The name is Claney,” said the stranger. There was a silence. Then: “Claney? Peter Claney?” “That’s right.” Baron’s eyes were wide with excitement, all trace of anger gone. “Great balls of fire, man— where have you been hiding? We’ve been trying to contact you for months!” “I know. I was hoping you’d quit looking and chuck the whole idea.” “Quit looking!” Baron bent forward over the table. “My friend, we’d given up hope, but we’ve never quit looking. Here, have a drink. There’s so much you can tell us.” His fingers were trembling. Peter Claney shook his head. “I can’t tell you anything you want to hear.” “But you’ve got to. You’re the only man on Earth who’s attempted a Brightside Crossing and lived through it! And the story you cleared for the news—it was nothing. We need details . Where did your equipment fall down? Where did you miscalculate? What were the trouble spots?” Baron jabbed a finger at Claney’s face. “That, for instance—epithelioma? Why? What was wrong with your glass? Your filters? We’ve got to know those things. If you can tell us, we can make it across where your attempt failed—” “You want to know why we failed?” asked Claney. “Of course we want to know. We have to know.” “It’s simple. We failed because it can’t be done. We couldn’t do it and neither can you. No human beings will ever cross the Brightside alive, not if they try for centuries.” “Nonsense,” Baron declared. “We will.” Claney shrugged. “I was there. I know what I’m saying. You can blame the equipment or the men—there were flaws in both quarters—but we just didn’t know what we were fighting. It was the planet that whipped us, that and the Sun . They’ll whip you, too, if you try it.” “Never,” said Baron. “Let me tell you,” Peter Claney said. I’d been interested in the Brightside for almost as long as I can remember (Claney said). I guess I was about ten when Wyatt and Carpenter made the last attempt—that was in 2082, I think. I followed the news stories like a tri-V serial and then I was heartbroken when they just disappeared. I know now that they were a pair of idiots, starting off without proper equipment, with practically no knowledge of surface conditions, without any charts—they couldn’t have made a hundred miles—but I didn’t know that then and it was a terrible tragedy. After that, I followed Sanderson’s work in the Twilight Lab up there and began to get Brightside into my blood, sure as death. But it was Mikuta’s idea to attempt a Crossing. Did you ever know Tom Mikuta? I don’t suppose you did. No, not Japanese—Polish-American. He was a major in the Interplanetary Service for some years and hung onto the title after he gave up his commission. He was with Armstrong on Mars during his Service days, did a good deal of the original mapping and surveying for the Colony there. I first met him on Venus; we spent five years together up there doing some of the nastiest exploring since the Matto Grasso. Then he made the attempt on Vulcan Crater that paved the way for Balmer a few years later. I’d always liked the Major—he was big and quiet and cool, the sort of guy who always had things figured a little further ahead than anyone else and always knew what to do in a tight place. Too many men in this game are all nerve and luck, with no judgment. The Major had both. He also had the kind of personality that could take a crew of wild men and make them work like a well-oiled machine across a thousand miles of Venus jungle. I liked him and I trusted him. He contacted me in New York and he was very casual at first. We spent an evening here at the Red Lion, talking about old times; he told me about the Vulcan business, and how he’d been out to see Sanderson and the Twilight Lab on Mercury, and how he preferred a hot trek to a cold one any day of the year—and then he wanted to know what I’d been doing since Venus and what my plans were. “No particular plans,” I told him. “Why?” He looked me over. “How much do you weigh, Peter?” I told him one-thirty-five. “That much!” he said. “Well, there can’t be much fat on you, at any rate. How do you take heat?” “You should know,” I said. “Venus was no icebox.” “No, I mean real heat.” Then I began to get it. “You’re planning a trip.” “That’s right. A hot trip.” He grinned at me. “Might be dangerous, too.” “What trip?” “Brightside of Mercury,” the Major said. I whistled cautiously. “At aphelion?” He threw his head back. “Why try a Crossing at aphelion? What have you done then? Four thousand miles of butcherous heat, just to have some joker come along, use your data and drum you out of the glory by crossing at perihelion forty-four days later? No, thanks. I want the Brightside without any nonsense about it.” He leaned across me eagerly. “I want to make a Crossing at perihelion and I want to cross on the surface. If a man can do that, he’s got Mercury. Until then, nobody’s got Mercury. I want Mercury—but I’ll need help getting it.” I’d thought of it a thousand times and never dared consider it. Nobody had, since Wyatt and Carpenter disappeared. Mercury turns on its axis in the same time that it wheels around the Sun, which means that the Brightside is always facing in. That makes the Brightside of Mercury at perihelion the hottest place in the Solar System, with one single exception: the surface of the Sun itself. It would be a hellish trek. Only a few men had ever learned just how hellish and they never came back to tell about it. It was a real hell’s Crossing, but someday, I thought, somebody would cross it. I wanted to be along. The Twilight Lab, near the northern pole of Mercury, was the obvious jumping-off place. The setup there wasn’t very extensive—a rocket landing, the labs and quarters for Sanderson’s crew sunk deep into the crust, and the tower that housed the Solar ’scope that Sanderson had built up there ten years before. Twilight Lab wasn’t particularly interested in the Brightside, of course—the Sun was Sanderson’s baby and he’d picked Mercury as the closest chunk of rock to the Sun that could hold his observatory. He’d chosen a good location, too. On Mercury, the Brightside temperature hits 770° F. at perihelion and the Darkside runs pretty constant at -410° F. No permanent installation with a human crew could survive at either extreme. But with Mercury’s wobble, the twilight zone between Brightside and Darkside offers something closer to survival temperatures. Sanderson built the Lab up near the pole, where the zone is about five miles wide, so the temperature only varies 50 to 60 degrees with the libration. The Solar ’scope could take that much change and they’d get good clear observation of the Sun for about seventy out of the eighty-eight days it takes the planet to wheel around. The Major was counting on Sanderson knowing something about Mercury as well as the Sun when we camped at the Lab to make final preparations. Sanderson did. He thought we’d lost our minds and he said so, but he gave us all the help he could. He spent a week briefing Jack Stone, the third member of our party, who had arrived with the supplies and equipment a few days earlier. Poor Jack met us at the rocket landing almost bawling, Sanderson had given him such a gloomy picture of what Brightside was like. Stone was a youngster—hardly twenty-five, I’d say—but he’d been with the Major at Vulcan and had begged to join this trek. I had a funny feeling that Jack really didn’t care for exploring too much, but he thought Mikuta was God, followed him around like a puppy. It didn’t matter to me as long as he knew what he was getting in for. You don’t go asking people in this game why they do it—they’re liable to get awfully uneasy and none of them can ever give you an answer that makes sense. Anyway, Stone had borrowed three men from the Lab, and had the supplies and equipment all lined up when we got there, ready to check and test. We dug right in. With plenty of funds—tri-V money and some government cash the Major had talked his way around—our equipment was new and good. Mikuta had done the designing and testing himself, with a big assist from Sanderson. We had four Bugs, three of them the light pillow-tire models, with special lead-cooled cut-in engines when the heat set in, and one heavy-duty tractor model for pulling the sledges. The Major went over them like a kid at the circus. Then he said, “Have you heard anything from McIvers?” “Who’s he?” Stone wanted to know. “He’ll be joining us. He’s a good man—got quite a name for climbing, back home.” The Major turned to me. “You’ve probably heard of him.” I’d heard plenty of stories about Ted McIvers and I wasn’t too happy to hear that he was joining us. “Kind of a daredevil, isn’t he?” “Maybe. He’s lucky and skillful. Where do you draw the line? We’ll need plenty of both.” “Have you ever worked with him?” I asked. “No. Are you worried?” “Not exactly. But Brightside is no place to count on luck.” The Major laughed. “I don’t think we need to worry about McIvers. We understood each other when I talked up the trip to him and we’re going to need each other too much to do any fooling around.” He turned back to the supply list. “Meanwhile, let’s get this stuff listed and packed. We’ll need to cut weight sharply and our time is short. Sanderson says we should leave in three days.” Two days later, McIvers hadn’t arrived. The Major didn’t say much about it. Stone was getting edgy and so was I. We spent the second day studying charts of the Brightside, such as they were. The best available were pretty poor, taken from so far out that the detail dissolved into blurs on blow-up. They showed the biggest ranges of peaks and craters and faults, and that was all. Still, we could use them to plan a broad outline of our course. “This range here,” the Major said as we crowded around the board, “is largely inactive, according to Sanderson. But these to the south and west could be active. Seismograph tracings suggest a lot of activity in that region, getting worse down toward the equator—not only volcanic, but sub-surface shifting.” Stone nodded. “Sanderson told me there was probably constant surface activity.” The Major shrugged. “Well, it’s treacherous, there’s no doubt of it. But the only way to avoid it is to travel over the Pole, which would lose us days and offer us no guarantee of less activity to the west. Now we might avoid some if we could find a pass through this range and cut sharp east—” It seemed that the more we considered the problem, the further we got from a solution. We knew there were active volcanoes on the Brightside—even on the Darkside, though surface activity there was pretty much slowed down and localized. But there were problems of atmosphere on Brightside, as well. There was an atmosphere and a constant atmospheric flow from Brightside to Darkside. Not much—the lighter gases had reached escape velocity and disappeared from Brightside millennia ago—but there was CO 2 , and nitrogen, and traces of other heavier gases. There was also an abundance of sulfur vapor, as well as carbon disulfide and sulfur dioxide. The atmospheric tide moved toward the Darkside, where it condensed, carrying enough volcanic ash with it for Sanderson to estimate the depth and nature of the surface upheavals on Brightside from his samplings. The trick was to find a passage that avoided those upheavals as far as possible. But in the final analysis, we were barely scraping the surface. The only way we would find out what was happening where was to be there. Finally, on the third day, McIvers blew in on a freight rocket from Venus. He’d missed the ship that the Major and I had taken by a few hours, and had conned his way to Venus in hopes of getting a hop from there. He didn’t seem too upset about it, as though this were his usual way of doing things and he couldn’t see why everyone should get so excited. He was a tall, rangy man with long, wavy hair prematurely gray, and the sort of eyes that looked like a climber’s—half-closed, sleepy, almost indolent, but capable of abrupt alertness. And he never stood still; he was always moving, always doing something with his hands, or talking, or pacing about. Evidently the Major decided not to press the issue of his arrival. There was still work to do, and an hour later we were running the final tests on the pressure suits. That evening, Stone and McIvers were thick as thieves, and everything was set for an early departure after we got some rest. “And that,” said Baron, finishing his drink and signaling the waiter for another pair, “was your first big mistake.” Peter Claney raised his eyebrows. “McIvers?” “Of course.” Claney shrugged, glanced at the small quiet tables around them. “There are lots of bizarre personalities around a place like this, and some of the best wouldn’t seem to be the most reliable at first glance. Anyway, personality problems weren’t our big problem right then. Equipment worried us first and route next.” Baron nodded in agreement. “What kind of suits did you have?” “The best insulating suits ever made,” said Claney. “Each one had an inner lining of a fiberglass modification, to avoid the clumsiness of asbestos, and carried the refrigerating unit and oxygen storage which we recharged from the sledges every eight hours. Outer layer carried a monomolecular chrome reflecting surface that made us glitter like Christmas trees. And we had a half-inch dead-air space under positive pressure between the two layers. Warning thermocouples, of course—at 770 degrees, it wouldn’t take much time to fry us to cinders if the suits failed somewhere.” “How about the Bugs?” “They were insulated, too, but we weren’t counting on them too much for protection.” “You weren’t!” Baron exclaimed. “Why not?” “We’d be in and out of them too much. They gave us mobility and storage, but we knew we’d have to do a lot of forward work on foot.” Claney smiled bitterly. “Which meant that we had an inch of fiberglass and a half-inch of dead air between us and a surface temperature where lead flowed like water and zinc was almost at melting point and the pools of sulfur in the shadows were boiling like oatmeal over a campfire.” Baron licked his lips. His fingers stroked the cool, wet glass as he set it down on the tablecloth. “Go on,” he said tautly. “You started on schedule?” “Oh, yes,” said Claney, “we started on schedule, all right. We just didn’t quite end on schedule, that was all. But I’m getting to that.” He settled back in his chair and continued. We jumped off from Twilight on a course due southeast with thirty days to make it to the Center of Brightside. If we could cross an average of seventy miles a day, we could hit Center exactly at perihelion, the point of Mercury’s closest approach to the Sun—which made Center the hottest part of the planet at the hottest it ever gets. The Sun was already huge and yellow over the horizon when we started, twice the size it appears on Earth. Every day that Sun would grow bigger and whiter, and every day the surface would get hotter. But once we reached Center, the job was only half done—we would still have to travel another two thousand miles to the opposite twilight zone. Sanderson was to meet us on the other side in the Laboratory’s scout ship, approximately sixty days from the time we jumped off. That was the plan, in outline. It was up to us to cross those seventy miles a day, no matter how hot it became, no matter what terrain we had to cross. Detours would be dangerous and time-consuming. Delays could cost us our lives. We all knew that. The Major briefed us on details an hour before we left. “Peter, you’ll take the lead Bug, the small one we stripped down for you. Stone and I will flank you on either side, giving you a hundred-yard lead. McIvers, you’ll have the job of dragging the sledges, so we’ll have to direct your course pretty closely. Peter’s job is to pick the passage at any given point. If there’s any doubt of safe passage, we’ll all explore ahead on foot before we risk the Bugs. Got that?” McIvers and Stone exchanged glances. McIvers said: “Jack and I were planning to change around. We figured he could take the sledges. That would give me a little more mobility.” The Major looked up sharply at Stone. “Do you buy that, Jack?” Stone shrugged. “I don’t mind. Mac wanted—” McIvers made an impatient gesture with his hands. “It doesn’t matter. I just feel better when I’m on the move. Does it make any difference?” “I guess it doesn’t,” said the Major. “Then you’ll flank Peter along with me. Right?” “Sure, sure.” McIvers pulled at his lower lip. “Who’s going to do the advance scouting?” “It sounds like I am,” I cut in. “We want to keep the lead Bug light as possible.” Mikuta nodded. “That’s right. Peter’s Bug is stripped down to the frame and wheels.” McIvers shook his head. “No, I mean the advance work. You need somebody out ahead—four or five miles, at least—to pick up the big flaws and active surface changes, don’t you?” He stared at the Major. “I mean, how can we tell what sort of a hole we may be moving into, unless we have a scout up ahead?” “That’s what we have the charts for,” the Major said sharply. “Charts! I’m talking about detail work. We don’t need to worry about the major topography. It’s the little faults you can’t see on the pictures that can kill us.” He tossed the charts down excitedly. “Look, let me take a Bug out ahead and work reconnaissance, keep five, maybe ten miles ahead of the column. I can stay on good solid ground, of course, but scan the area closely and radio back to Peter where to avoid the flaws. Then—” “No dice,” the Major broke in. “But why not? We could save ourselves days!” “I don’t care what we could save. We stay together. When we get to the Center, I want live men along with me. That means we stay within easy sight of each other at all times. Any climber knows that everybody is safer in a party than one man alone—any time, any place.” McIvers stared at him, his cheeks an angry red. Finally he gave a sullen nod. “Okay. If you say so.” “Well, I say so and I mean it. I don’t want any fancy stuff. We’re going to hit Center together, and finish the Crossing together. Got that?” McIvers nodded. Mikuta then looked at Stone and me and we nodded, too. “All right,” he said slowly. “Now that we’ve got it straight, let’s go.” It was hot. If I forget everything else about that trek, I’ll never forget that huge yellow Sun glaring down, without a break, hotter and hotter with every mile. We knew that the first few days would be the easiest and we were rested and fresh when we started down the long ragged gorge southeast of the Twilight Lab. I moved out first; back over my shoulder, I could see the Major and McIvers crawling out behind me, their pillow tires taking the rugged floor of the gorge smoothly. Behind them, Stone dragged the sledges. Even at only 30 per cent Earth gravity they were a strain on the big tractor, until the ski-blades bit into the fluffy volcanic ash blanketing the valley. We even had a path to follow for the first twenty miles. I kept my eyes pasted to the big polaroid binocs, picking out the track the early research teams had made out into the edge of Brightside. But in a couple of hours we rumbled past Sanderson’s little outpost observatory and the tracks stopped. We were in virgin territory and already the Sun was beginning to bite. We didn’t feel the heat so much those first days out. We saw it. The refrig units kept our skins at a nice comfortable seventy-five degrees Fahrenheit inside our suits, but our eyes watched that glaring Sun and the baked yellow rocks going past, and some nerve pathways got twisted up, somehow. We poured sweat as if we were in a superheated furnace. We drove eight hours and slept five. When a sleep period came due, we pulled the Bugs together into a square, threw up a light aluminum sun-shield and lay out in the dust and rocks. The sun-shield cut the temperature down sixty or seventy degrees, for whatever help that was. And then we ate from the forward sledge—sucking through tubes—protein, carbohydrates, bulk gelatin, vitamins. The Major measured water out with an iron hand, because we’d have drunk ourselves into nephritis in a week otherwise. We were constantly, unceasingly thirsty. Ask the physiologists and psychiatrists why—they can give you have a dozen interesting reasons—but all we knew, or cared about, was that it happened to be so. We didn’t sleep the first few stops, as a consequence. Our eyes burned in spite of the filters and we had roaring headaches, but we couldn’t sleep them off. We sat around looking at each other. Then McIvers would say how good a beer would taste, and off we’d go. We’d have murdered our grandmothers for one ice-cold bottle of beer. After a few driving periods, I began to get my bearings at the wheel. We were moving down into desolation that made Earth’s old Death Valley look like a Japanese rose garden. Huge sun-baked cracks opened up in the floor of the gorge, with black cliffs jutting up on either side; the air was filled with a barely visible yellowish mist of sulfur and sulfurous gases. It was a hot, barren hole, no place for any man to go, but the challenge was so powerful you could almost feel it. No one had ever crossed this land before and escaped. Those who had tried it had been cruelly punished, but the land was still there, so it had to be crossed. Not the easy way. It had to be crossed the hardest way possible: overland, through anything the land could throw up to us, at the most difficult time possible. Yet we knew that even the land might have been conquered before, except for that Sun. We’d fought absolute cold before and won. We’d never fought heat like this and won. The only worse heat in the Solar System was the surface of the Sun itself. Brightside was worth trying for. We would get it or it would get us. That was the bargain. I learned a lot about Mercury those first few driving periods. The gorge petered out after a hundred miles and we moved onto the slope of a range of ragged craters that ran south and east. This range had shown no activity since the first landing on Mercury forty years before, but beyond it there were active cones. Yellow fumes rose from the craters constantly; their sides were shrouded with heavy ash. We couldn’t detect a wind, but we knew there was a hot, sulfurous breeze sweeping in great continental tides across the face of the planet. Not enough for erosion, though. The craters rose up out of jagged gorges, huge towering spears of rock and rubble. Below were the vast yellow flatlands, smoking and hissing from the gases beneath the crust. Over everything was gray dust—silicates and salts, pumice and limestone and granite ash, filling crevices and declivities—offering a soft, treacherous surface for the Bug’s pillow tires. I learned to read the ground, to tell a covered fault by the sag of the dust; I learned to spot a passable crack, and tell it from an impassable cut. Time after time the Bugs ground to a halt while we explored a passage on foot, tied together with light copper cable, digging, advancing, digging some more until we were sure the surface would carry the machines. It was cruel work; we slept in exhaustion. But it went smoothly, at first. Too smoothly, it seemed to me, and the others seemed to think so, too. McIvers’ restlessness was beginning to grate on our nerves. He talked too much, while we were resting or while we were driving; wisecracks, witticisms, unfunny jokes that wore thin with repetition. He took to making side trips from the route now and then, never far, but a little further each time. Jack Stone reacted quite the opposite; he grew quieter with each stop, more reserved and apprehensive. I didn’t like it, but I figured that it would pass off after a while. I was apprehensive enough myself; I just managed to hide it better. And every mile the Sun got bigger and whiter and higher in the sky and hotter. Without our ultra-violet screens and glare filters we would have been blinded; as it was our eyes ached constantly and the skin on our faces itched and tingled at the end of an eight-hour trek. But it took one of those side trips of McIvers’ to deliver the penultimate blow to our already fraying nerves. He had driven down a side-branch of a long canyon running off west of our route and was almost out of sight in a cloud of ash when we heard a sharp cry through our earphones. I wheeled my Bug around with my heart in my throat and spotted him through the binocs, waving frantically from the top of his machine. The Major and I took off, lumbering down the gulch after him as fast as the Bugs could go, with a thousand horrible pictures racing through our minds.... We found him standing stock-still, pointing down the gorge and, for once, he didn’t have anything to say. It was the wreck of a Bug; an old-fashioned half-track model of the sort that hadn’t been in use for years. It was wedged tight in a cut in the rock, an axle broken, its casing split wide open up the middle, half-buried in a rock slide. A dozen feet away were two insulated suits with white bones gleaming through the fiberglass helmets. This was as far as Wyatt and Carpenter had gotten on their Brightside Crossing. On the fifth driving period out, the terrain began to change. It looked the same, but every now and then it felt different. On two occasions I felt my wheels spin, with a howl of protest from my engine. Then, quite suddenly, the Bug gave a lurch; I gunned my motor and nothing happened. I could see the dull gray stuff seeping up around the hubs, thick and tenacious, splattering around in steaming gobs as the wheels spun. I knew what had happened the moment the wheels gave and, a few minutes later, they chained me to the tractor and dragged me back out of the mire. It looked for all the world like thick gray mud, but it was a pit of molten lead, steaming under a soft layer of concealing ash. I picked my way more cautiously then. We were getting into an area of recent surface activity; the surface was really treacherous. I caught myself wishing that the Major had okayed McIvers’ scheme for an advanced scout; more dangerous for the individual, maybe, but I was driving blind now and I didn’t like it. One error in judgment could sink us all, but I wasn’t thinking much about the others. I was worried about me , plenty worried. I kept thinking, better McIvers should go than me. It wasn’t healthy thinking and I knew it, but I couldn’t get the thought out of my mind. It was a grueling eight hours and we slept poorly. Back in the Bug again, we moved still more slowly—edging out on a broad flat plateau, dodging a network of gaping surface cracks—winding back and forth in an effort to keep the machines on solid rock. I couldn’t see far ahead, because of the yellow haze rising from the cracks, so I was almost on top of it when I saw a sharp cut ahead where the surface dropped six feet beyond a deep crack. I let out a shout to halt the others; then I edged my Bug forward, peering at the cleft. It was deep and wide. I moved fifty yards to the left, then back to the right. There was only one place that looked like a possible crossing; a long, narrow ledge of gray stuff that lay down across a section of the fault like a ramp. Even as I watched it, I could feel the surface crust under the Bug trembling and saw the ledge shift over a few feet.

Describe the setting of the story.

6

Brightside Crossing by Alan E. Nourse mostly takes place on the surface of Mercury. The main characters begin in an observatory equipped to support human life as well as do research on the planet itself. However, they quickly move on in their journey to cross the Brightside at perihelion. Full of craters, gorges, and cracked land, the planet’s surface is incredibly dangerous to travel on. Sulfurous, hot winds blow across the planet. Beyond the towering, rocky spears and jagged gorges lay yellow valleys and flatlands. The gas beneath the surface of the planet can cause volcanic-like eruptions. This gas can also imply rise up from the core and poison the atmosphere around it. Gray dust caused by years of erosion rested atop every surface. Mercury is an incredibly hot planet, being the nearest to the sun, and the surface reflects that.

49165

Brightside Crossing by Alan E. Nourse JAMES BARON was not pleased to hear that he had had a visitor when he reached the Red Lion that evening. He had no stomach for mysteries, vast or trifling, and there were pressing things to think about at this time. Yet the doorman had flagged him as he came in from the street: “A thousand pardons, Mr. Baron. The gentleman—he would leave no name. He said you’d want to see him. He will be back by eight.” Now Baron drummed his fingers on the table top, staring about the quiet lounge. Street trade was discouraged at the Red Lion, gently but persuasively; the patrons were few in number. Across to the right was a group that Baron knew vaguely—Andean climbers, or at least two of them were. Over near the door he recognized old Balmer, who had mapped the first passage to the core of Vulcan Crater on Venus. Baron returned his smile with a nod. Then he settled back and waited impatiently for the intruder who demanded his time without justifying it. Presently a small, grizzled man crossed the room and sat down at Baron’s table. He was short and wiry. His face held no key to his age—he might have been thirty or a thousand—but he looked weary and immensely ugly. His cheeks and forehead were twisted and brown, with scars that were still healing. The stranger said, “I’m glad you waited. I’ve heard you’re planning to attempt the Brightside.” Baron stared at the man for a moment. “I see you can read telecasts,” he said coldly. “The news was correct. We are going to make a Brightside Crossing.” “At perihelion?” “Of course. When else?” The grizzled man searched Baron’s face for a moment without expression. Then he said slowly, “No, I’m afraid you’re not going to make the Crossing.” “Say, who are you, if you don’t mind?” Baron demanded. “The name is Claney,” said the stranger. There was a silence. Then: “Claney? Peter Claney?” “That’s right.” Baron’s eyes were wide with excitement, all trace of anger gone. “Great balls of fire, man— where have you been hiding? We’ve been trying to contact you for months!” “I know. I was hoping you’d quit looking and chuck the whole idea.” “Quit looking!” Baron bent forward over the table. “My friend, we’d given up hope, but we’ve never quit looking. Here, have a drink. There’s so much you can tell us.” His fingers were trembling. Peter Claney shook his head. “I can’t tell you anything you want to hear.” “But you’ve got to. You’re the only man on Earth who’s attempted a Brightside Crossing and lived through it! And the story you cleared for the news—it was nothing. We need details . Where did your equipment fall down? Where did you miscalculate? What were the trouble spots?” Baron jabbed a finger at Claney’s face. “That, for instance—epithelioma? Why? What was wrong with your glass? Your filters? We’ve got to know those things. If you can tell us, we can make it across where your attempt failed—” “You want to know why we failed?” asked Claney. “Of course we want to know. We have to know.” “It’s simple. We failed because it can’t be done. We couldn’t do it and neither can you. No human beings will ever cross the Brightside alive, not if they try for centuries.” “Nonsense,” Baron declared. “We will.” Claney shrugged. “I was there. I know what I’m saying. You can blame the equipment or the men—there were flaws in both quarters—but we just didn’t know what we were fighting. It was the planet that whipped us, that and the Sun . They’ll whip you, too, if you try it.” “Never,” said Baron. “Let me tell you,” Peter Claney said. I’d been interested in the Brightside for almost as long as I can remember (Claney said). I guess I was about ten when Wyatt and Carpenter made the last attempt—that was in 2082, I think. I followed the news stories like a tri-V serial and then I was heartbroken when they just disappeared. I know now that they were a pair of idiots, starting off without proper equipment, with practically no knowledge of surface conditions, without any charts—they couldn’t have made a hundred miles—but I didn’t know that then and it was a terrible tragedy. After that, I followed Sanderson’s work in the Twilight Lab up there and began to get Brightside into my blood, sure as death. But it was Mikuta’s idea to attempt a Crossing. Did you ever know Tom Mikuta? I don’t suppose you did. No, not Japanese—Polish-American. He was a major in the Interplanetary Service for some years and hung onto the title after he gave up his commission. He was with Armstrong on Mars during his Service days, did a good deal of the original mapping and surveying for the Colony there. I first met him on Venus; we spent five years together up there doing some of the nastiest exploring since the Matto Grasso. Then he made the attempt on Vulcan Crater that paved the way for Balmer a few years later. I’d always liked the Major—he was big and quiet and cool, the sort of guy who always had things figured a little further ahead than anyone else and always knew what to do in a tight place. Too many men in this game are all nerve and luck, with no judgment. The Major had both. He also had the kind of personality that could take a crew of wild men and make them work like a well-oiled machine across a thousand miles of Venus jungle. I liked him and I trusted him. He contacted me in New York and he was very casual at first. We spent an evening here at the Red Lion, talking about old times; he told me about the Vulcan business, and how he’d been out to see Sanderson and the Twilight Lab on Mercury, and how he preferred a hot trek to a cold one any day of the year—and then he wanted to know what I’d been doing since Venus and what my plans were. “No particular plans,” I told him. “Why?” He looked me over. “How much do you weigh, Peter?” I told him one-thirty-five. “That much!” he said. “Well, there can’t be much fat on you, at any rate. How do you take heat?” “You should know,” I said. “Venus was no icebox.” “No, I mean real heat.” Then I began to get it. “You’re planning a trip.” “That’s right. A hot trip.” He grinned at me. “Might be dangerous, too.” “What trip?” “Brightside of Mercury,” the Major said. I whistled cautiously. “At aphelion?” He threw his head back. “Why try a Crossing at aphelion? What have you done then? Four thousand miles of butcherous heat, just to have some joker come along, use your data and drum you out of the glory by crossing at perihelion forty-four days later? No, thanks. I want the Brightside without any nonsense about it.” He leaned across me eagerly. “I want to make a Crossing at perihelion and I want to cross on the surface. If a man can do that, he’s got Mercury. Until then, nobody’s got Mercury. I want Mercury—but I’ll need help getting it.” I’d thought of it a thousand times and never dared consider it. Nobody had, since Wyatt and Carpenter disappeared. Mercury turns on its axis in the same time that it wheels around the Sun, which means that the Brightside is always facing in. That makes the Brightside of Mercury at perihelion the hottest place in the Solar System, with one single exception: the surface of the Sun itself. It would be a hellish trek. Only a few men had ever learned just how hellish and they never came back to tell about it. It was a real hell’s Crossing, but someday, I thought, somebody would cross it. I wanted to be along. The Twilight Lab, near the northern pole of Mercury, was the obvious jumping-off place. The setup there wasn’t very extensive—a rocket landing, the labs and quarters for Sanderson’s crew sunk deep into the crust, and the tower that housed the Solar ’scope that Sanderson had built up there ten years before. Twilight Lab wasn’t particularly interested in the Brightside, of course—the Sun was Sanderson’s baby and he’d picked Mercury as the closest chunk of rock to the Sun that could hold his observatory. He’d chosen a good location, too. On Mercury, the Brightside temperature hits 770° F. at perihelion and the Darkside runs pretty constant at -410° F. No permanent installation with a human crew could survive at either extreme. But with Mercury’s wobble, the twilight zone between Brightside and Darkside offers something closer to survival temperatures. Sanderson built the Lab up near the pole, where the zone is about five miles wide, so the temperature only varies 50 to 60 degrees with the libration. The Solar ’scope could take that much change and they’d get good clear observation of the Sun for about seventy out of the eighty-eight days it takes the planet to wheel around. The Major was counting on Sanderson knowing something about Mercury as well as the Sun when we camped at the Lab to make final preparations. Sanderson did. He thought we’d lost our minds and he said so, but he gave us all the help he could. He spent a week briefing Jack Stone, the third member of our party, who had arrived with the supplies and equipment a few days earlier. Poor Jack met us at the rocket landing almost bawling, Sanderson had given him such a gloomy picture of what Brightside was like. Stone was a youngster—hardly twenty-five, I’d say—but he’d been with the Major at Vulcan and had begged to join this trek. I had a funny feeling that Jack really didn’t care for exploring too much, but he thought Mikuta was God, followed him around like a puppy. It didn’t matter to me as long as he knew what he was getting in for. You don’t go asking people in this game why they do it—they’re liable to get awfully uneasy and none of them can ever give you an answer that makes sense. Anyway, Stone had borrowed three men from the Lab, and had the supplies and equipment all lined up when we got there, ready to check and test. We dug right in. With plenty of funds—tri-V money and some government cash the Major had talked his way around—our equipment was new and good. Mikuta had done the designing and testing himself, with a big assist from Sanderson. We had four Bugs, three of them the light pillow-tire models, with special lead-cooled cut-in engines when the heat set in, and one heavy-duty tractor model for pulling the sledges. The Major went over them like a kid at the circus. Then he said, “Have you heard anything from McIvers?” “Who’s he?” Stone wanted to know. “He’ll be joining us. He’s a good man—got quite a name for climbing, back home.” The Major turned to me. “You’ve probably heard of him.” I’d heard plenty of stories about Ted McIvers and I wasn’t too happy to hear that he was joining us. “Kind of a daredevil, isn’t he?” “Maybe. He’s lucky and skillful. Where do you draw the line? We’ll need plenty of both.” “Have you ever worked with him?” I asked. “No. Are you worried?” “Not exactly. But Brightside is no place to count on luck.” The Major laughed. “I don’t think we need to worry about McIvers. We understood each other when I talked up the trip to him and we’re going to need each other too much to do any fooling around.” He turned back to the supply list. “Meanwhile, let’s get this stuff listed and packed. We’ll need to cut weight sharply and our time is short. Sanderson says we should leave in three days.” Two days later, McIvers hadn’t arrived. The Major didn’t say much about it. Stone was getting edgy and so was I. We spent the second day studying charts of the Brightside, such as they were. The best available were pretty poor, taken from so far out that the detail dissolved into blurs on blow-up. They showed the biggest ranges of peaks and craters and faults, and that was all. Still, we could use them to plan a broad outline of our course. “This range here,” the Major said as we crowded around the board, “is largely inactive, according to Sanderson. But these to the south and west could be active. Seismograph tracings suggest a lot of activity in that region, getting worse down toward the equator—not only volcanic, but sub-surface shifting.” Stone nodded. “Sanderson told me there was probably constant surface activity.” The Major shrugged. “Well, it’s treacherous, there’s no doubt of it. But the only way to avoid it is to travel over the Pole, which would lose us days and offer us no guarantee of less activity to the west. Now we might avoid some if we could find a pass through this range and cut sharp east—” It seemed that the more we considered the problem, the further we got from a solution. We knew there were active volcanoes on the Brightside—even on the Darkside, though surface activity there was pretty much slowed down and localized. But there were problems of atmosphere on Brightside, as well. There was an atmosphere and a constant atmospheric flow from Brightside to Darkside. Not much—the lighter gases had reached escape velocity and disappeared from Brightside millennia ago—but there was CO 2 , and nitrogen, and traces of other heavier gases. There was also an abundance of sulfur vapor, as well as carbon disulfide and sulfur dioxide. The atmospheric tide moved toward the Darkside, where it condensed, carrying enough volcanic ash with it for Sanderson to estimate the depth and nature of the surface upheavals on Brightside from his samplings. The trick was to find a passage that avoided those upheavals as far as possible. But in the final analysis, we were barely scraping the surface. The only way we would find out what was happening where was to be there. Finally, on the third day, McIvers blew in on a freight rocket from Venus. He’d missed the ship that the Major and I had taken by a few hours, and had conned his way to Venus in hopes of getting a hop from there. He didn’t seem too upset about it, as though this were his usual way of doing things and he couldn’t see why everyone should get so excited. He was a tall, rangy man with long, wavy hair prematurely gray, and the sort of eyes that looked like a climber’s—half-closed, sleepy, almost indolent, but capable of abrupt alertness. And he never stood still; he was always moving, always doing something with his hands, or talking, or pacing about. Evidently the Major decided not to press the issue of his arrival. There was still work to do, and an hour later we were running the final tests on the pressure suits. That evening, Stone and McIvers were thick as thieves, and everything was set for an early departure after we got some rest. “And that,” said Baron, finishing his drink and signaling the waiter for another pair, “was your first big mistake.” Peter Claney raised his eyebrows. “McIvers?” “Of course.” Claney shrugged, glanced at the small quiet tables around them. “There are lots of bizarre personalities around a place like this, and some of the best wouldn’t seem to be the most reliable at first glance. Anyway, personality problems weren’t our big problem right then. Equipment worried us first and route next.” Baron nodded in agreement. “What kind of suits did you have?” “The best insulating suits ever made,” said Claney. “Each one had an inner lining of a fiberglass modification, to avoid the clumsiness of asbestos, and carried the refrigerating unit and oxygen storage which we recharged from the sledges every eight hours. Outer layer carried a monomolecular chrome reflecting surface that made us glitter like Christmas trees. And we had a half-inch dead-air space under positive pressure between the two layers. Warning thermocouples, of course—at 770 degrees, it wouldn’t take much time to fry us to cinders if the suits failed somewhere.” “How about the Bugs?” “They were insulated, too, but we weren’t counting on them too much for protection.” “You weren’t!” Baron exclaimed. “Why not?” “We’d be in and out of them too much. They gave us mobility and storage, but we knew we’d have to do a lot of forward work on foot.” Claney smiled bitterly. “Which meant that we had an inch of fiberglass and a half-inch of dead air between us and a surface temperature where lead flowed like water and zinc was almost at melting point and the pools of sulfur in the shadows were boiling like oatmeal over a campfire.” Baron licked his lips. His fingers stroked the cool, wet glass as he set it down on the tablecloth. “Go on,” he said tautly. “You started on schedule?” “Oh, yes,” said Claney, “we started on schedule, all right. We just didn’t quite end on schedule, that was all. But I’m getting to that.” He settled back in his chair and continued. We jumped off from Twilight on a course due southeast with thirty days to make it to the Center of Brightside. If we could cross an average of seventy miles a day, we could hit Center exactly at perihelion, the point of Mercury’s closest approach to the Sun—which made Center the hottest part of the planet at the hottest it ever gets. The Sun was already huge and yellow over the horizon when we started, twice the size it appears on Earth. Every day that Sun would grow bigger and whiter, and every day the surface would get hotter. But once we reached Center, the job was only half done—we would still have to travel another two thousand miles to the opposite twilight zone. Sanderson was to meet us on the other side in the Laboratory’s scout ship, approximately sixty days from the time we jumped off. That was the plan, in outline. It was up to us to cross those seventy miles a day, no matter how hot it became, no matter what terrain we had to cross. Detours would be dangerous and time-consuming. Delays could cost us our lives. We all knew that. The Major briefed us on details an hour before we left. “Peter, you’ll take the lead Bug, the small one we stripped down for you. Stone and I will flank you on either side, giving you a hundred-yard lead. McIvers, you’ll have the job of dragging the sledges, so we’ll have to direct your course pretty closely. Peter’s job is to pick the passage at any given point. If there’s any doubt of safe passage, we’ll all explore ahead on foot before we risk the Bugs. Got that?” McIvers and Stone exchanged glances. McIvers said: “Jack and I were planning to change around. We figured he could take the sledges. That would give me a little more mobility.” The Major looked up sharply at Stone. “Do you buy that, Jack?” Stone shrugged. “I don’t mind. Mac wanted—” McIvers made an impatient gesture with his hands. “It doesn’t matter. I just feel better when I’m on the move. Does it make any difference?” “I guess it doesn’t,” said the Major. “Then you’ll flank Peter along with me. Right?” “Sure, sure.” McIvers pulled at his lower lip. “Who’s going to do the advance scouting?” “It sounds like I am,” I cut in. “We want to keep the lead Bug light as possible.” Mikuta nodded. “That’s right. Peter’s Bug is stripped down to the frame and wheels.” McIvers shook his head. “No, I mean the advance work. You need somebody out ahead—four or five miles, at least—to pick up the big flaws and active surface changes, don’t you?” He stared at the Major. “I mean, how can we tell what sort of a hole we may be moving into, unless we have a scout up ahead?” “That’s what we have the charts for,” the Major said sharply. “Charts! I’m talking about detail work. We don’t need to worry about the major topography. It’s the little faults you can’t see on the pictures that can kill us.” He tossed the charts down excitedly. “Look, let me take a Bug out ahead and work reconnaissance, keep five, maybe ten miles ahead of the column. I can stay on good solid ground, of course, but scan the area closely and radio back to Peter where to avoid the flaws. Then—” “No dice,” the Major broke in. “But why not? We could save ourselves days!” “I don’t care what we could save. We stay together. When we get to the Center, I want live men along with me. That means we stay within easy sight of each other at all times. Any climber knows that everybody is safer in a party than one man alone—any time, any place.” McIvers stared at him, his cheeks an angry red. Finally he gave a sullen nod. “Okay. If you say so.” “Well, I say so and I mean it. I don’t want any fancy stuff. We’re going to hit Center together, and finish the Crossing together. Got that?” McIvers nodded. Mikuta then looked at Stone and me and we nodded, too. “All right,” he said slowly. “Now that we’ve got it straight, let’s go.” It was hot. If I forget everything else about that trek, I’ll never forget that huge yellow Sun glaring down, without a break, hotter and hotter with every mile. We knew that the first few days would be the easiest and we were rested and fresh when we started down the long ragged gorge southeast of the Twilight Lab. I moved out first; back over my shoulder, I could see the Major and McIvers crawling out behind me, their pillow tires taking the rugged floor of the gorge smoothly. Behind them, Stone dragged the sledges. Even at only 30 per cent Earth gravity they were a strain on the big tractor, until the ski-blades bit into the fluffy volcanic ash blanketing the valley. We even had a path to follow for the first twenty miles. I kept my eyes pasted to the big polaroid binocs, picking out the track the early research teams had made out into the edge of Brightside. But in a couple of hours we rumbled past Sanderson’s little outpost observatory and the tracks stopped. We were in virgin territory and already the Sun was beginning to bite. We didn’t feel the heat so much those first days out. We saw it. The refrig units kept our skins at a nice comfortable seventy-five degrees Fahrenheit inside our suits, but our eyes watched that glaring Sun and the baked yellow rocks going past, and some nerve pathways got twisted up, somehow. We poured sweat as if we were in a superheated furnace. We drove eight hours and slept five. When a sleep period came due, we pulled the Bugs together into a square, threw up a light aluminum sun-shield and lay out in the dust and rocks. The sun-shield cut the temperature down sixty or seventy degrees, for whatever help that was. And then we ate from the forward sledge—sucking through tubes—protein, carbohydrates, bulk gelatin, vitamins. The Major measured water out with an iron hand, because we’d have drunk ourselves into nephritis in a week otherwise. We were constantly, unceasingly thirsty. Ask the physiologists and psychiatrists why—they can give you have a dozen interesting reasons—but all we knew, or cared about, was that it happened to be so. We didn’t sleep the first few stops, as a consequence. Our eyes burned in spite of the filters and we had roaring headaches, but we couldn’t sleep them off. We sat around looking at each other. Then McIvers would say how good a beer would taste, and off we’d go. We’d have murdered our grandmothers for one ice-cold bottle of beer. After a few driving periods, I began to get my bearings at the wheel. We were moving down into desolation that made Earth’s old Death Valley look like a Japanese rose garden. Huge sun-baked cracks opened up in the floor of the gorge, with black cliffs jutting up on either side; the air was filled with a barely visible yellowish mist of sulfur and sulfurous gases. It was a hot, barren hole, no place for any man to go, but the challenge was so powerful you could almost feel it. No one had ever crossed this land before and escaped. Those who had tried it had been cruelly punished, but the land was still there, so it had to be crossed. Not the easy way. It had to be crossed the hardest way possible: overland, through anything the land could throw up to us, at the most difficult time possible. Yet we knew that even the land might have been conquered before, except for that Sun. We’d fought absolute cold before and won. We’d never fought heat like this and won. The only worse heat in the Solar System was the surface of the Sun itself. Brightside was worth trying for. We would get it or it would get us. That was the bargain. I learned a lot about Mercury those first few driving periods. The gorge petered out after a hundred miles and we moved onto the slope of a range of ragged craters that ran south and east. This range had shown no activity since the first landing on Mercury forty years before, but beyond it there were active cones. Yellow fumes rose from the craters constantly; their sides were shrouded with heavy ash. We couldn’t detect a wind, but we knew there was a hot, sulfurous breeze sweeping in great continental tides across the face of the planet. Not enough for erosion, though. The craters rose up out of jagged gorges, huge towering spears of rock and rubble. Below were the vast yellow flatlands, smoking and hissing from the gases beneath the crust. Over everything was gray dust—silicates and salts, pumice and limestone and granite ash, filling crevices and declivities—offering a soft, treacherous surface for the Bug’s pillow tires. I learned to read the ground, to tell a covered fault by the sag of the dust; I learned to spot a passable crack, and tell it from an impassable cut. Time after time the Bugs ground to a halt while we explored a passage on foot, tied together with light copper cable, digging, advancing, digging some more until we were sure the surface would carry the machines. It was cruel work; we slept in exhaustion. But it went smoothly, at first. Too smoothly, it seemed to me, and the others seemed to think so, too. McIvers’ restlessness was beginning to grate on our nerves. He talked too much, while we were resting or while we were driving; wisecracks, witticisms, unfunny jokes that wore thin with repetition. He took to making side trips from the route now and then, never far, but a little further each time. Jack Stone reacted quite the opposite; he grew quieter with each stop, more reserved and apprehensive. I didn’t like it, but I figured that it would pass off after a while. I was apprehensive enough myself; I just managed to hide it better. And every mile the Sun got bigger and whiter and higher in the sky and hotter. Without our ultra-violet screens and glare filters we would have been blinded; as it was our eyes ached constantly and the skin on our faces itched and tingled at the end of an eight-hour trek. But it took one of those side trips of McIvers’ to deliver the penultimate blow to our already fraying nerves. He had driven down a side-branch of a long canyon running off west of our route and was almost out of sight in a cloud of ash when we heard a sharp cry through our earphones. I wheeled my Bug around with my heart in my throat and spotted him through the binocs, waving frantically from the top of his machine. The Major and I took off, lumbering down the gulch after him as fast as the Bugs could go, with a thousand horrible pictures racing through our minds.... We found him standing stock-still, pointing down the gorge and, for once, he didn’t have anything to say. It was the wreck of a Bug; an old-fashioned half-track model of the sort that hadn’t been in use for years. It was wedged tight in a cut in the rock, an axle broken, its casing split wide open up the middle, half-buried in a rock slide. A dozen feet away were two insulated suits with white bones gleaming through the fiberglass helmets. This was as far as Wyatt and Carpenter had gotten on their Brightside Crossing. On the fifth driving period out, the terrain began to change. It looked the same, but every now and then it felt different. On two occasions I felt my wheels spin, with a howl of protest from my engine. Then, quite suddenly, the Bug gave a lurch; I gunned my motor and nothing happened. I could see the dull gray stuff seeping up around the hubs, thick and tenacious, splattering around in steaming gobs as the wheels spun. I knew what had happened the moment the wheels gave and, a few minutes later, they chained me to the tractor and dragged me back out of the mire. It looked for all the world like thick gray mud, but it was a pit of molten lead, steaming under a soft layer of concealing ash. I picked my way more cautiously then. We were getting into an area of recent surface activity; the surface was really treacherous. I caught myself wishing that the Major had okayed McIvers’ scheme for an advanced scout; more dangerous for the individual, maybe, but I was driving blind now and I didn’t like it. One error in judgment could sink us all, but I wasn’t thinking much about the others. I was worried about me , plenty worried. I kept thinking, better McIvers should go than me. It wasn’t healthy thinking and I knew it, but I couldn’t get the thought out of my mind. It was a grueling eight hours and we slept poorly. Back in the Bug again, we moved still more slowly—edging out on a broad flat plateau, dodging a network of gaping surface cracks—winding back and forth in an effort to keep the machines on solid rock. I couldn’t see far ahead, because of the yellow haze rising from the cracks, so I was almost on top of it when I saw a sharp cut ahead where the surface dropped six feet beyond a deep crack. I let out a shout to halt the others; then I edged my Bug forward, peering at the cleft. It was deep and wide. I moved fifty yards to the left, then back to the right. There was only one place that looked like a possible crossing; a long, narrow ledge of gray stuff that lay down across a section of the fault like a ramp. Even as I watched it, I could feel the surface crust under the Bug trembling and saw the ledge shift over a few feet.

Describe the setting of the story.

10

The only ‘real’ setting is a bar called Red Lion where Baron and Peter are sitting together. All other settings are imagined through Peter’s recalling of past events. Peter’s story includes settings from the Twilight Lab (an observatory on Mercury in the twilight zone between the bright and dark sides of the planet), in vehicles called Bugs on the surface of Mercury as his expedition party tries to cross the Brightside, and in various inhospitable locations on the surface of the bright side of the planet, including molten lead lakes and volcanoes. The surface of the planet Mercury that faces the sun is referred to as the Brightside. Crossing it is extremely difficult due to the environmental conditions. It is described that the bright side of mercury is always facing towards the light as it rotates around the sun, never having darkness over it. It is an extremely hot place (770F), known to have active volcanoes, and an atmosphere that is mostly CO2, nitrogen and heavier gases. Humans must wear specialized suits to keep their body temperature at 75F while on the Brightside. A journey from the twilight zone (the transition between the bright and dark sides of the planet) to the Center of the Brightside would take about 30 days.

49165

Brightside Crossing by Alan E. Nourse JAMES BARON was not pleased to hear that he had had a visitor when he reached the Red Lion that evening. He had no stomach for mysteries, vast or trifling, and there were pressing things to think about at this time. Yet the doorman had flagged him as he came in from the street: “A thousand pardons, Mr. Baron. The gentleman—he would leave no name. He said you’d want to see him. He will be back by eight.” Now Baron drummed his fingers on the table top, staring about the quiet lounge. Street trade was discouraged at the Red Lion, gently but persuasively; the patrons were few in number. Across to the right was a group that Baron knew vaguely—Andean climbers, or at least two of them were. Over near the door he recognized old Balmer, who had mapped the first passage to the core of Vulcan Crater on Venus. Baron returned his smile with a nod. Then he settled back and waited impatiently for the intruder who demanded his time without justifying it. Presently a small, grizzled man crossed the room and sat down at Baron’s table. He was short and wiry. His face held no key to his age—he might have been thirty or a thousand—but he looked weary and immensely ugly. His cheeks and forehead were twisted and brown, with scars that were still healing. The stranger said, “I’m glad you waited. I’ve heard you’re planning to attempt the Brightside.” Baron stared at the man for a moment. “I see you can read telecasts,” he said coldly. “The news was correct. We are going to make a Brightside Crossing.” “At perihelion?” “Of course. When else?” The grizzled man searched Baron’s face for a moment without expression. Then he said slowly, “No, I’m afraid you’re not going to make the Crossing.” “Say, who are you, if you don’t mind?” Baron demanded. “The name is Claney,” said the stranger. There was a silence. Then: “Claney? Peter Claney?” “That’s right.” Baron’s eyes were wide with excitement, all trace of anger gone. “Great balls of fire, man— where have you been hiding? We’ve been trying to contact you for months!” “I know. I was hoping you’d quit looking and chuck the whole idea.” “Quit looking!” Baron bent forward over the table. “My friend, we’d given up hope, but we’ve never quit looking. Here, have a drink. There’s so much you can tell us.” His fingers were trembling. Peter Claney shook his head. “I can’t tell you anything you want to hear.” “But you’ve got to. You’re the only man on Earth who’s attempted a Brightside Crossing and lived through it! And the story you cleared for the news—it was nothing. We need details . Where did your equipment fall down? Where did you miscalculate? What were the trouble spots?” Baron jabbed a finger at Claney’s face. “That, for instance—epithelioma? Why? What was wrong with your glass? Your filters? We’ve got to know those things. If you can tell us, we can make it across where your attempt failed—” “You want to know why we failed?” asked Claney. “Of course we want to know. We have to know.” “It’s simple. We failed because it can’t be done. We couldn’t do it and neither can you. No human beings will ever cross the Brightside alive, not if they try for centuries.” “Nonsense,” Baron declared. “We will.” Claney shrugged. “I was there. I know what I’m saying. You can blame the equipment or the men—there were flaws in both quarters—but we just didn’t know what we were fighting. It was the planet that whipped us, that and the Sun . They’ll whip you, too, if you try it.” “Never,” said Baron. “Let me tell you,” Peter Claney said. I’d been interested in the Brightside for almost as long as I can remember (Claney said). I guess I was about ten when Wyatt and Carpenter made the last attempt—that was in 2082, I think. I followed the news stories like a tri-V serial and then I was heartbroken when they just disappeared. I know now that they were a pair of idiots, starting off without proper equipment, with practically no knowledge of surface conditions, without any charts—they couldn’t have made a hundred miles—but I didn’t know that then and it was a terrible tragedy. After that, I followed Sanderson’s work in the Twilight Lab up there and began to get Brightside into my blood, sure as death. But it was Mikuta’s idea to attempt a Crossing. Did you ever know Tom Mikuta? I don’t suppose you did. No, not Japanese—Polish-American. He was a major in the Interplanetary Service for some years and hung onto the title after he gave up his commission. He was with Armstrong on Mars during his Service days, did a good deal of the original mapping and surveying for the Colony there. I first met him on Venus; we spent five years together up there doing some of the nastiest exploring since the Matto Grasso. Then he made the attempt on Vulcan Crater that paved the way for Balmer a few years later. I’d always liked the Major—he was big and quiet and cool, the sort of guy who always had things figured a little further ahead than anyone else and always knew what to do in a tight place. Too many men in this game are all nerve and luck, with no judgment. The Major had both. He also had the kind of personality that could take a crew of wild men and make them work like a well-oiled machine across a thousand miles of Venus jungle. I liked him and I trusted him. He contacted me in New York and he was very casual at first. We spent an evening here at the Red Lion, talking about old times; he told me about the Vulcan business, and how he’d been out to see Sanderson and the Twilight Lab on Mercury, and how he preferred a hot trek to a cold one any day of the year—and then he wanted to know what I’d been doing since Venus and what my plans were. “No particular plans,” I told him. “Why?” He looked me over. “How much do you weigh, Peter?” I told him one-thirty-five. “That much!” he said. “Well, there can’t be much fat on you, at any rate. How do you take heat?” “You should know,” I said. “Venus was no icebox.” “No, I mean real heat.” Then I began to get it. “You’re planning a trip.” “That’s right. A hot trip.” He grinned at me. “Might be dangerous, too.” “What trip?” “Brightside of Mercury,” the Major said. I whistled cautiously. “At aphelion?” He threw his head back. “Why try a Crossing at aphelion? What have you done then? Four thousand miles of butcherous heat, just to have some joker come along, use your data and drum you out of the glory by crossing at perihelion forty-four days later? No, thanks. I want the Brightside without any nonsense about it.” He leaned across me eagerly. “I want to make a Crossing at perihelion and I want to cross on the surface. If a man can do that, he’s got Mercury. Until then, nobody’s got Mercury. I want Mercury—but I’ll need help getting it.” I’d thought of it a thousand times and never dared consider it. Nobody had, since Wyatt and Carpenter disappeared. Mercury turns on its axis in the same time that it wheels around the Sun, which means that the Brightside is always facing in. That makes the Brightside of Mercury at perihelion the hottest place in the Solar System, with one single exception: the surface of the Sun itself. It would be a hellish trek. Only a few men had ever learned just how hellish and they never came back to tell about it. It was a real hell’s Crossing, but someday, I thought, somebody would cross it. I wanted to be along. The Twilight Lab, near the northern pole of Mercury, was the obvious jumping-off place. The setup there wasn’t very extensive—a rocket landing, the labs and quarters for Sanderson’s crew sunk deep into the crust, and the tower that housed the Solar ’scope that Sanderson had built up there ten years before. Twilight Lab wasn’t particularly interested in the Brightside, of course—the Sun was Sanderson’s baby and he’d picked Mercury as the closest chunk of rock to the Sun that could hold his observatory. He’d chosen a good location, too. On Mercury, the Brightside temperature hits 770° F. at perihelion and the Darkside runs pretty constant at -410° F. No permanent installation with a human crew could survive at either extreme. But with Mercury’s wobble, the twilight zone between Brightside and Darkside offers something closer to survival temperatures. Sanderson built the Lab up near the pole, where the zone is about five miles wide, so the temperature only varies 50 to 60 degrees with the libration. The Solar ’scope could take that much change and they’d get good clear observation of the Sun for about seventy out of the eighty-eight days it takes the planet to wheel around. The Major was counting on Sanderson knowing something about Mercury as well as the Sun when we camped at the Lab to make final preparations. Sanderson did. He thought we’d lost our minds and he said so, but he gave us all the help he could. He spent a week briefing Jack Stone, the third member of our party, who had arrived with the supplies and equipment a few days earlier. Poor Jack met us at the rocket landing almost bawling, Sanderson had given him such a gloomy picture of what Brightside was like. Stone was a youngster—hardly twenty-five, I’d say—but he’d been with the Major at Vulcan and had begged to join this trek. I had a funny feeling that Jack really didn’t care for exploring too much, but he thought Mikuta was God, followed him around like a puppy. It didn’t matter to me as long as he knew what he was getting in for. You don’t go asking people in this game why they do it—they’re liable to get awfully uneasy and none of them can ever give you an answer that makes sense. Anyway, Stone had borrowed three men from the Lab, and had the supplies and equipment all lined up when we got there, ready to check and test. We dug right in. With plenty of funds—tri-V money and some government cash the Major had talked his way around—our equipment was new and good. Mikuta had done the designing and testing himself, with a big assist from Sanderson. We had four Bugs, three of them the light pillow-tire models, with special lead-cooled cut-in engines when the heat set in, and one heavy-duty tractor model for pulling the sledges. The Major went over them like a kid at the circus. Then he said, “Have you heard anything from McIvers?” “Who’s he?” Stone wanted to know. “He’ll be joining us. He’s a good man—got quite a name for climbing, back home.” The Major turned to me. “You’ve probably heard of him.” I’d heard plenty of stories about Ted McIvers and I wasn’t too happy to hear that he was joining us. “Kind of a daredevil, isn’t he?” “Maybe. He’s lucky and skillful. Where do you draw the line? We’ll need plenty of both.” “Have you ever worked with him?” I asked. “No. Are you worried?” “Not exactly. But Brightside is no place to count on luck.” The Major laughed. “I don’t think we need to worry about McIvers. We understood each other when I talked up the trip to him and we’re going to need each other too much to do any fooling around.” He turned back to the supply list. “Meanwhile, let’s get this stuff listed and packed. We’ll need to cut weight sharply and our time is short. Sanderson says we should leave in three days.” Two days later, McIvers hadn’t arrived. The Major didn’t say much about it. Stone was getting edgy and so was I. We spent the second day studying charts of the Brightside, such as they were. The best available were pretty poor, taken from so far out that the detail dissolved into blurs on blow-up. They showed the biggest ranges of peaks and craters and faults, and that was all. Still, we could use them to plan a broad outline of our course. “This range here,” the Major said as we crowded around the board, “is largely inactive, according to Sanderson. But these to the south and west could be active. Seismograph tracings suggest a lot of activity in that region, getting worse down toward the equator—not only volcanic, but sub-surface shifting.” Stone nodded. “Sanderson told me there was probably constant surface activity.” The Major shrugged. “Well, it’s treacherous, there’s no doubt of it. But the only way to avoid it is to travel over the Pole, which would lose us days and offer us no guarantee of less activity to the west. Now we might avoid some if we could find a pass through this range and cut sharp east—” It seemed that the more we considered the problem, the further we got from a solution. We knew there were active volcanoes on the Brightside—even on the Darkside, though surface activity there was pretty much slowed down and localized. But there were problems of atmosphere on Brightside, as well. There was an atmosphere and a constant atmospheric flow from Brightside to Darkside. Not much—the lighter gases had reached escape velocity and disappeared from Brightside millennia ago—but there was CO 2 , and nitrogen, and traces of other heavier gases. There was also an abundance of sulfur vapor, as well as carbon disulfide and sulfur dioxide. The atmospheric tide moved toward the Darkside, where it condensed, carrying enough volcanic ash with it for Sanderson to estimate the depth and nature of the surface upheavals on Brightside from his samplings. The trick was to find a passage that avoided those upheavals as far as possible. But in the final analysis, we were barely scraping the surface. The only way we would find out what was happening where was to be there. Finally, on the third day, McIvers blew in on a freight rocket from Venus. He’d missed the ship that the Major and I had taken by a few hours, and had conned his way to Venus in hopes of getting a hop from there. He didn’t seem too upset about it, as though this were his usual way of doing things and he couldn’t see why everyone should get so excited. He was a tall, rangy man with long, wavy hair prematurely gray, and the sort of eyes that looked like a climber’s—half-closed, sleepy, almost indolent, but capable of abrupt alertness. And he never stood still; he was always moving, always doing something with his hands, or talking, or pacing about. Evidently the Major decided not to press the issue of his arrival. There was still work to do, and an hour later we were running the final tests on the pressure suits. That evening, Stone and McIvers were thick as thieves, and everything was set for an early departure after we got some rest. “And that,” said Baron, finishing his drink and signaling the waiter for another pair, “was your first big mistake.” Peter Claney raised his eyebrows. “McIvers?” “Of course.” Claney shrugged, glanced at the small quiet tables around them. “There are lots of bizarre personalities around a place like this, and some of the best wouldn’t seem to be the most reliable at first glance. Anyway, personality problems weren’t our big problem right then. Equipment worried us first and route next.” Baron nodded in agreement. “What kind of suits did you have?” “The best insulating suits ever made,” said Claney. “Each one had an inner lining of a fiberglass modification, to avoid the clumsiness of asbestos, and carried the refrigerating unit and oxygen storage which we recharged from the sledges every eight hours. Outer layer carried a monomolecular chrome reflecting surface that made us glitter like Christmas trees. And we had a half-inch dead-air space under positive pressure between the two layers. Warning thermocouples, of course—at 770 degrees, it wouldn’t take much time to fry us to cinders if the suits failed somewhere.” “How about the Bugs?” “They were insulated, too, but we weren’t counting on them too much for protection.” “You weren’t!” Baron exclaimed. “Why not?” “We’d be in and out of them too much. They gave us mobility and storage, but we knew we’d have to do a lot of forward work on foot.” Claney smiled bitterly. “Which meant that we had an inch of fiberglass and a half-inch of dead air between us and a surface temperature where lead flowed like water and zinc was almost at melting point and the pools of sulfur in the shadows were boiling like oatmeal over a campfire.” Baron licked his lips. His fingers stroked the cool, wet glass as he set it down on the tablecloth. “Go on,” he said tautly. “You started on schedule?” “Oh, yes,” said Claney, “we started on schedule, all right. We just didn’t quite end on schedule, that was all. But I’m getting to that.” He settled back in his chair and continued. We jumped off from Twilight on a course due southeast with thirty days to make it to the Center of Brightside. If we could cross an average of seventy miles a day, we could hit Center exactly at perihelion, the point of Mercury’s closest approach to the Sun—which made Center the hottest part of the planet at the hottest it ever gets. The Sun was already huge and yellow over the horizon when we started, twice the size it appears on Earth. Every day that Sun would grow bigger and whiter, and every day the surface would get hotter. But once we reached Center, the job was only half done—we would still have to travel another two thousand miles to the opposite twilight zone. Sanderson was to meet us on the other side in the Laboratory’s scout ship, approximately sixty days from the time we jumped off. That was the plan, in outline. It was up to us to cross those seventy miles a day, no matter how hot it became, no matter what terrain we had to cross. Detours would be dangerous and time-consuming. Delays could cost us our lives. We all knew that. The Major briefed us on details an hour before we left. “Peter, you’ll take the lead Bug, the small one we stripped down for you. Stone and I will flank you on either side, giving you a hundred-yard lead. McIvers, you’ll have the job of dragging the sledges, so we’ll have to direct your course pretty closely. Peter’s job is to pick the passage at any given point. If there’s any doubt of safe passage, we’ll all explore ahead on foot before we risk the Bugs. Got that?” McIvers and Stone exchanged glances. McIvers said: “Jack and I were planning to change around. We figured he could take the sledges. That would give me a little more mobility.” The Major looked up sharply at Stone. “Do you buy that, Jack?” Stone shrugged. “I don’t mind. Mac wanted—” McIvers made an impatient gesture with his hands. “It doesn’t matter. I just feel better when I’m on the move. Does it make any difference?” “I guess it doesn’t,” said the Major. “Then you’ll flank Peter along with me. Right?” “Sure, sure.” McIvers pulled at his lower lip. “Who’s going to do the advance scouting?” “It sounds like I am,” I cut in. “We want to keep the lead Bug light as possible.” Mikuta nodded. “That’s right. Peter’s Bug is stripped down to the frame and wheels.” McIvers shook his head. “No, I mean the advance work. You need somebody out ahead—four or five miles, at least—to pick up the big flaws and active surface changes, don’t you?” He stared at the Major. “I mean, how can we tell what sort of a hole we may be moving into, unless we have a scout up ahead?” “That’s what we have the charts for,” the Major said sharply. “Charts! I’m talking about detail work. We don’t need to worry about the major topography. It’s the little faults you can’t see on the pictures that can kill us.” He tossed the charts down excitedly. “Look, let me take a Bug out ahead and work reconnaissance, keep five, maybe ten miles ahead of the column. I can stay on good solid ground, of course, but scan the area closely and radio back to Peter where to avoid the flaws. Then—” “No dice,” the Major broke in. “But why not? We could save ourselves days!” “I don’t care what we could save. We stay together. When we get to the Center, I want live men along with me. That means we stay within easy sight of each other at all times. Any climber knows that everybody is safer in a party than one man alone—any time, any place.” McIvers stared at him, his cheeks an angry red. Finally he gave a sullen nod. “Okay. If you say so.” “Well, I say so and I mean it. I don’t want any fancy stuff. We’re going to hit Center together, and finish the Crossing together. Got that?” McIvers nodded. Mikuta then looked at Stone and me and we nodded, too. “All right,” he said slowly. “Now that we’ve got it straight, let’s go.” It was hot. If I forget everything else about that trek, I’ll never forget that huge yellow Sun glaring down, without a break, hotter and hotter with every mile. We knew that the first few days would be the easiest and we were rested and fresh when we started down the long ragged gorge southeast of the Twilight Lab. I moved out first; back over my shoulder, I could see the Major and McIvers crawling out behind me, their pillow tires taking the rugged floor of the gorge smoothly. Behind them, Stone dragged the sledges. Even at only 30 per cent Earth gravity they were a strain on the big tractor, until the ski-blades bit into the fluffy volcanic ash blanketing the valley. We even had a path to follow for the first twenty miles. I kept my eyes pasted to the big polaroid binocs, picking out the track the early research teams had made out into the edge of Brightside. But in a couple of hours we rumbled past Sanderson’s little outpost observatory and the tracks stopped. We were in virgin territory and already the Sun was beginning to bite. We didn’t feel the heat so much those first days out. We saw it. The refrig units kept our skins at a nice comfortable seventy-five degrees Fahrenheit inside our suits, but our eyes watched that glaring Sun and the baked yellow rocks going past, and some nerve pathways got twisted up, somehow. We poured sweat as if we were in a superheated furnace. We drove eight hours and slept five. When a sleep period came due, we pulled the Bugs together into a square, threw up a light aluminum sun-shield and lay out in the dust and rocks. The sun-shield cut the temperature down sixty or seventy degrees, for whatever help that was. And then we ate from the forward sledge—sucking through tubes—protein, carbohydrates, bulk gelatin, vitamins. The Major measured water out with an iron hand, because we’d have drunk ourselves into nephritis in a week otherwise. We were constantly, unceasingly thirsty. Ask the physiologists and psychiatrists why—they can give you have a dozen interesting reasons—but all we knew, or cared about, was that it happened to be so. We didn’t sleep the first few stops, as a consequence. Our eyes burned in spite of the filters and we had roaring headaches, but we couldn’t sleep them off. We sat around looking at each other. Then McIvers would say how good a beer would taste, and off we’d go. We’d have murdered our grandmothers for one ice-cold bottle of beer. After a few driving periods, I began to get my bearings at the wheel. We were moving down into desolation that made Earth’s old Death Valley look like a Japanese rose garden. Huge sun-baked cracks opened up in the floor of the gorge, with black cliffs jutting up on either side; the air was filled with a barely visible yellowish mist of sulfur and sulfurous gases. It was a hot, barren hole, no place for any man to go, but the challenge was so powerful you could almost feel it. No one had ever crossed this land before and escaped. Those who had tried it had been cruelly punished, but the land was still there, so it had to be crossed. Not the easy way. It had to be crossed the hardest way possible: overland, through anything the land could throw up to us, at the most difficult time possible. Yet we knew that even the land might have been conquered before, except for that Sun. We’d fought absolute cold before and won. We’d never fought heat like this and won. The only worse heat in the Solar System was the surface of the Sun itself. Brightside was worth trying for. We would get it or it would get us. That was the bargain. I learned a lot about Mercury those first few driving periods. The gorge petered out after a hundred miles and we moved onto the slope of a range of ragged craters that ran south and east. This range had shown no activity since the first landing on Mercury forty years before, but beyond it there were active cones. Yellow fumes rose from the craters constantly; their sides were shrouded with heavy ash. We couldn’t detect a wind, but we knew there was a hot, sulfurous breeze sweeping in great continental tides across the face of the planet. Not enough for erosion, though. The craters rose up out of jagged gorges, huge towering spears of rock and rubble. Below were the vast yellow flatlands, smoking and hissing from the gases beneath the crust. Over everything was gray dust—silicates and salts, pumice and limestone and granite ash, filling crevices and declivities—offering a soft, treacherous surface for the Bug’s pillow tires. I learned to read the ground, to tell a covered fault by the sag of the dust; I learned to spot a passable crack, and tell it from an impassable cut. Time after time the Bugs ground to a halt while we explored a passage on foot, tied together with light copper cable, digging, advancing, digging some more until we were sure the surface would carry the machines. It was cruel work; we slept in exhaustion. But it went smoothly, at first. Too smoothly, it seemed to me, and the others seemed to think so, too. McIvers’ restlessness was beginning to grate on our nerves. He talked too much, while we were resting or while we were driving; wisecracks, witticisms, unfunny jokes that wore thin with repetition. He took to making side trips from the route now and then, never far, but a little further each time. Jack Stone reacted quite the opposite; he grew quieter with each stop, more reserved and apprehensive. I didn’t like it, but I figured that it would pass off after a while. I was apprehensive enough myself; I just managed to hide it better. And every mile the Sun got bigger and whiter and higher in the sky and hotter. Without our ultra-violet screens and glare filters we would have been blinded; as it was our eyes ached constantly and the skin on our faces itched and tingled at the end of an eight-hour trek. But it took one of those side trips of McIvers’ to deliver the penultimate blow to our already fraying nerves. He had driven down a side-branch of a long canyon running off west of our route and was almost out of sight in a cloud of ash when we heard a sharp cry through our earphones. I wheeled my Bug around with my heart in my throat and spotted him through the binocs, waving frantically from the top of his machine. The Major and I took off, lumbering down the gulch after him as fast as the Bugs could go, with a thousand horrible pictures racing through our minds.... We found him standing stock-still, pointing down the gorge and, for once, he didn’t have anything to say. It was the wreck of a Bug; an old-fashioned half-track model of the sort that hadn’t been in use for years. It was wedged tight in a cut in the rock, an axle broken, its casing split wide open up the middle, half-buried in a rock slide. A dozen feet away were two insulated suits with white bones gleaming through the fiberglass helmets. This was as far as Wyatt and Carpenter had gotten on their Brightside Crossing. On the fifth driving period out, the terrain began to change. It looked the same, but every now and then it felt different. On two occasions I felt my wheels spin, with a howl of protest from my engine. Then, quite suddenly, the Bug gave a lurch; I gunned my motor and nothing happened. I could see the dull gray stuff seeping up around the hubs, thick and tenacious, splattering around in steaming gobs as the wheels spun. I knew what had happened the moment the wheels gave and, a few minutes later, they chained me to the tractor and dragged me back out of the mire. It looked for all the world like thick gray mud, but it was a pit of molten lead, steaming under a soft layer of concealing ash. I picked my way more cautiously then. We were getting into an area of recent surface activity; the surface was really treacherous. I caught myself wishing that the Major had okayed McIvers’ scheme for an advanced scout; more dangerous for the individual, maybe, but I was driving blind now and I didn’t like it. One error in judgment could sink us all, but I wasn’t thinking much about the others. I was worried about me , plenty worried. I kept thinking, better McIvers should go than me. It wasn’t healthy thinking and I knew it, but I couldn’t get the thought out of my mind. It was a grueling eight hours and we slept poorly. Back in the Bug again, we moved still more slowly—edging out on a broad flat plateau, dodging a network of gaping surface cracks—winding back and forth in an effort to keep the machines on solid rock. I couldn’t see far ahead, because of the yellow haze rising from the cracks, so I was almost on top of it when I saw a sharp cut ahead where the surface dropped six feet beyond a deep crack. I let out a shout to halt the others; then I edged my Bug forward, peering at the cleft. It was deep and wide. I moved fifty yards to the left, then back to the right. There was only one place that looked like a possible crossing; a long, narrow ledge of gray stuff that lay down across a section of the fault like a ramp. Even as I watched it, I could feel the surface crust under the Bug trembling and saw the ledge shift over a few feet.

Describe the setting of the story.

9

The initial setting is on Earth, in New York, outside of and then inside of a bar called the Red Lion. It is a quiet and sparsely populated lounge where some other adventurers (Andean climbers, the person who had mapped a previous voyage for Baron) are in attendance. Peter Claney’s story touches briefly on settings during his childhood (presumably somewhere on Earth), Mikuta’s time on Mars, his time with Mikuta on Venus, and New York again, but the primary setting is Mercury. The first area of Mercury they encounter is the Twilight Lab, located near Mercury’s north pole. This is the jumping off point for the mission, and includes a rocket landing, labs and quarters located deep in Mercury’s crust, and a tower with a solar scope. Mercury’s temperature is around -410 degrees F on the darkside and can reach 770 degrees on the brightside. The lab is located in a twilight zone between the two, which is about five miles wide at the pole and allows the area to be habitable. The brightside has ranges of craters, peaks, and faults; some ranges are inactive while others have volcanic activity and shifting below surface level. The atmosphere is as treacherous as the terrain, with Co2, nitrogen, traces of heavier gases, sulfur vapor, carbon disulfide, and sulfur dioxide flowing in constant atmospheric tides from the brightside to the darkside. The first thirty miles of the trek take them through fluffy volcanic ash and into virgin territory full of desolate gorges and intense heat. They see tall, jagged rocks, as well as the yellow, smoky plains below them. They venture closer and closer to the sun, and have to be increasingly cautious of the tenuous surface of Mercury. Based on Claney saying he was ten in 2082, the events Claney describes as well as his meeting with Baron likely occur in the 2100s (or later).

49165

Brightside Crossing by Alan E. Nourse JAMES BARON was not pleased to hear that he had had a visitor when he reached the Red Lion that evening. He had no stomach for mysteries, vast or trifling, and there were pressing things to think about at this time. Yet the doorman had flagged him as he came in from the street: “A thousand pardons, Mr. Baron. The gentleman—he would leave no name. He said you’d want to see him. He will be back by eight.” Now Baron drummed his fingers on the table top, staring about the quiet lounge. Street trade was discouraged at the Red Lion, gently but persuasively; the patrons were few in number. Across to the right was a group that Baron knew vaguely—Andean climbers, or at least two of them were. Over near the door he recognized old Balmer, who had mapped the first passage to the core of Vulcan Crater on Venus. Baron returned his smile with a nod. Then he settled back and waited impatiently for the intruder who demanded his time without justifying it. Presently a small, grizzled man crossed the room and sat down at Baron’s table. He was short and wiry. His face held no key to his age—he might have been thirty or a thousand—but he looked weary and immensely ugly. His cheeks and forehead were twisted and brown, with scars that were still healing. The stranger said, “I’m glad you waited. I’ve heard you’re planning to attempt the Brightside.” Baron stared at the man for a moment. “I see you can read telecasts,” he said coldly. “The news was correct. We are going to make a Brightside Crossing.” “At perihelion?” “Of course. When else?” The grizzled man searched Baron’s face for a moment without expression. Then he said slowly, “No, I’m afraid you’re not going to make the Crossing.” “Say, who are you, if you don’t mind?” Baron demanded. “The name is Claney,” said the stranger. There was a silence. Then: “Claney? Peter Claney?” “That’s right.” Baron’s eyes were wide with excitement, all trace of anger gone. “Great balls of fire, man— where have you been hiding? We’ve been trying to contact you for months!” “I know. I was hoping you’d quit looking and chuck the whole idea.” “Quit looking!” Baron bent forward over the table. “My friend, we’d given up hope, but we’ve never quit looking. Here, have a drink. There’s so much you can tell us.” His fingers were trembling. Peter Claney shook his head. “I can’t tell you anything you want to hear.” “But you’ve got to. You’re the only man on Earth who’s attempted a Brightside Crossing and lived through it! And the story you cleared for the news—it was nothing. We need details . Where did your equipment fall down? Where did you miscalculate? What were the trouble spots?” Baron jabbed a finger at Claney’s face. “That, for instance—epithelioma? Why? What was wrong with your glass? Your filters? We’ve got to know those things. If you can tell us, we can make it across where your attempt failed—” “You want to know why we failed?” asked Claney. “Of course we want to know. We have to know.” “It’s simple. We failed because it can’t be done. We couldn’t do it and neither can you. No human beings will ever cross the Brightside alive, not if they try for centuries.” “Nonsense,” Baron declared. “We will.” Claney shrugged. “I was there. I know what I’m saying. You can blame the equipment or the men—there were flaws in both quarters—but we just didn’t know what we were fighting. It was the planet that whipped us, that and the Sun . They’ll whip you, too, if you try it.” “Never,” said Baron. “Let me tell you,” Peter Claney said. I’d been interested in the Brightside for almost as long as I can remember (Claney said). I guess I was about ten when Wyatt and Carpenter made the last attempt—that was in 2082, I think. I followed the news stories like a tri-V serial and then I was heartbroken when they just disappeared. I know now that they were a pair of idiots, starting off without proper equipment, with practically no knowledge of surface conditions, without any charts—they couldn’t have made a hundred miles—but I didn’t know that then and it was a terrible tragedy. After that, I followed Sanderson’s work in the Twilight Lab up there and began to get Brightside into my blood, sure as death. But it was Mikuta’s idea to attempt a Crossing. Did you ever know Tom Mikuta? I don’t suppose you did. No, not Japanese—Polish-American. He was a major in the Interplanetary Service for some years and hung onto the title after he gave up his commission. He was with Armstrong on Mars during his Service days, did a good deal of the original mapping and surveying for the Colony there. I first met him on Venus; we spent five years together up there doing some of the nastiest exploring since the Matto Grasso. Then he made the attempt on Vulcan Crater that paved the way for Balmer a few years later. I’d always liked the Major—he was big and quiet and cool, the sort of guy who always had things figured a little further ahead than anyone else and always knew what to do in a tight place. Too many men in this game are all nerve and luck, with no judgment. The Major had both. He also had the kind of personality that could take a crew of wild men and make them work like a well-oiled machine across a thousand miles of Venus jungle. I liked him and I trusted him. He contacted me in New York and he was very casual at first. We spent an evening here at the Red Lion, talking about old times; he told me about the Vulcan business, and how he’d been out to see Sanderson and the Twilight Lab on Mercury, and how he preferred a hot trek to a cold one any day of the year—and then he wanted to know what I’d been doing since Venus and what my plans were. “No particular plans,” I told him. “Why?” He looked me over. “How much do you weigh, Peter?” I told him one-thirty-five. “That much!” he said. “Well, there can’t be much fat on you, at any rate. How do you take heat?” “You should know,” I said. “Venus was no icebox.” “No, I mean real heat.” Then I began to get it. “You’re planning a trip.” “That’s right. A hot trip.” He grinned at me. “Might be dangerous, too.” “What trip?” “Brightside of Mercury,” the Major said. I whistled cautiously. “At aphelion?” He threw his head back. “Why try a Crossing at aphelion? What have you done then? Four thousand miles of butcherous heat, just to have some joker come along, use your data and drum you out of the glory by crossing at perihelion forty-four days later? No, thanks. I want the Brightside without any nonsense about it.” He leaned across me eagerly. “I want to make a Crossing at perihelion and I want to cross on the surface. If a man can do that, he’s got Mercury. Until then, nobody’s got Mercury. I want Mercury—but I’ll need help getting it.” I’d thought of it a thousand times and never dared consider it. Nobody had, since Wyatt and Carpenter disappeared. Mercury turns on its axis in the same time that it wheels around the Sun, which means that the Brightside is always facing in. That makes the Brightside of Mercury at perihelion the hottest place in the Solar System, with one single exception: the surface of the Sun itself. It would be a hellish trek. Only a few men had ever learned just how hellish and they never came back to tell about it. It was a real hell’s Crossing, but someday, I thought, somebody would cross it. I wanted to be along. The Twilight Lab, near the northern pole of Mercury, was the obvious jumping-off place. The setup there wasn’t very extensive—a rocket landing, the labs and quarters for Sanderson’s crew sunk deep into the crust, and the tower that housed the Solar ’scope that Sanderson had built up there ten years before. Twilight Lab wasn’t particularly interested in the Brightside, of course—the Sun was Sanderson’s baby and he’d picked Mercury as the closest chunk of rock to the Sun that could hold his observatory. He’d chosen a good location, too. On Mercury, the Brightside temperature hits 770° F. at perihelion and the Darkside runs pretty constant at -410° F. No permanent installation with a human crew could survive at either extreme. But with Mercury’s wobble, the twilight zone between Brightside and Darkside offers something closer to survival temperatures. Sanderson built the Lab up near the pole, where the zone is about five miles wide, so the temperature only varies 50 to 60 degrees with the libration. The Solar ’scope could take that much change and they’d get good clear observation of the Sun for about seventy out of the eighty-eight days it takes the planet to wheel around. The Major was counting on Sanderson knowing something about Mercury as well as the Sun when we camped at the Lab to make final preparations. Sanderson did. He thought we’d lost our minds and he said so, but he gave us all the help he could. He spent a week briefing Jack Stone, the third member of our party, who had arrived with the supplies and equipment a few days earlier. Poor Jack met us at the rocket landing almost bawling, Sanderson had given him such a gloomy picture of what Brightside was like. Stone was a youngster—hardly twenty-five, I’d say—but he’d been with the Major at Vulcan and had begged to join this trek. I had a funny feeling that Jack really didn’t care for exploring too much, but he thought Mikuta was God, followed him around like a puppy. It didn’t matter to me as long as he knew what he was getting in for. You don’t go asking people in this game why they do it—they’re liable to get awfully uneasy and none of them can ever give you an answer that makes sense. Anyway, Stone had borrowed three men from the Lab, and had the supplies and equipment all lined up when we got there, ready to check and test. We dug right in. With plenty of funds—tri-V money and some government cash the Major had talked his way around—our equipment was new and good. Mikuta had done the designing and testing himself, with a big assist from Sanderson. We had four Bugs, three of them the light pillow-tire models, with special lead-cooled cut-in engines when the heat set in, and one heavy-duty tractor model for pulling the sledges. The Major went over them like a kid at the circus. Then he said, “Have you heard anything from McIvers?” “Who’s he?” Stone wanted to know. “He’ll be joining us. He’s a good man—got quite a name for climbing, back home.” The Major turned to me. “You’ve probably heard of him.” I’d heard plenty of stories about Ted McIvers and I wasn’t too happy to hear that he was joining us. “Kind of a daredevil, isn’t he?” “Maybe. He’s lucky and skillful. Where do you draw the line? We’ll need plenty of both.” “Have you ever worked with him?” I asked. “No. Are you worried?” “Not exactly. But Brightside is no place to count on luck.” The Major laughed. “I don’t think we need to worry about McIvers. We understood each other when I talked up the trip to him and we’re going to need each other too much to do any fooling around.” He turned back to the supply list. “Meanwhile, let’s get this stuff listed and packed. We’ll need to cut weight sharply and our time is short. Sanderson says we should leave in three days.” Two days later, McIvers hadn’t arrived. The Major didn’t say much about it. Stone was getting edgy and so was I. We spent the second day studying charts of the Brightside, such as they were. The best available were pretty poor, taken from so far out that the detail dissolved into blurs on blow-up. They showed the biggest ranges of peaks and craters and faults, and that was all. Still, we could use them to plan a broad outline of our course. “This range here,” the Major said as we crowded around the board, “is largely inactive, according to Sanderson. But these to the south and west could be active. Seismograph tracings suggest a lot of activity in that region, getting worse down toward the equator—not only volcanic, but sub-surface shifting.” Stone nodded. “Sanderson told me there was probably constant surface activity.” The Major shrugged. “Well, it’s treacherous, there’s no doubt of it. But the only way to avoid it is to travel over the Pole, which would lose us days and offer us no guarantee of less activity to the west. Now we might avoid some if we could find a pass through this range and cut sharp east—” It seemed that the more we considered the problem, the further we got from a solution. We knew there were active volcanoes on the Brightside—even on the Darkside, though surface activity there was pretty much slowed down and localized. But there were problems of atmosphere on Brightside, as well. There was an atmosphere and a constant atmospheric flow from Brightside to Darkside. Not much—the lighter gases had reached escape velocity and disappeared from Brightside millennia ago—but there was CO 2 , and nitrogen, and traces of other heavier gases. There was also an abundance of sulfur vapor, as well as carbon disulfide and sulfur dioxide. The atmospheric tide moved toward the Darkside, where it condensed, carrying enough volcanic ash with it for Sanderson to estimate the depth and nature of the surface upheavals on Brightside from his samplings. The trick was to find a passage that avoided those upheavals as far as possible. But in the final analysis, we were barely scraping the surface. The only way we would find out what was happening where was to be there. Finally, on the third day, McIvers blew in on a freight rocket from Venus. He’d missed the ship that the Major and I had taken by a few hours, and had conned his way to Venus in hopes of getting a hop from there. He didn’t seem too upset about it, as though this were his usual way of doing things and he couldn’t see why everyone should get so excited. He was a tall, rangy man with long, wavy hair prematurely gray, and the sort of eyes that looked like a climber’s—half-closed, sleepy, almost indolent, but capable of abrupt alertness. And he never stood still; he was always moving, always doing something with his hands, or talking, or pacing about. Evidently the Major decided not to press the issue of his arrival. There was still work to do, and an hour later we were running the final tests on the pressure suits. That evening, Stone and McIvers were thick as thieves, and everything was set for an early departure after we got some rest. “And that,” said Baron, finishing his drink and signaling the waiter for another pair, “was your first big mistake.” Peter Claney raised his eyebrows. “McIvers?” “Of course.” Claney shrugged, glanced at the small quiet tables around them. “There are lots of bizarre personalities around a place like this, and some of the best wouldn’t seem to be the most reliable at first glance. Anyway, personality problems weren’t our big problem right then. Equipment worried us first and route next.” Baron nodded in agreement. “What kind of suits did you have?” “The best insulating suits ever made,” said Claney. “Each one had an inner lining of a fiberglass modification, to avoid the clumsiness of asbestos, and carried the refrigerating unit and oxygen storage which we recharged from the sledges every eight hours. Outer layer carried a monomolecular chrome reflecting surface that made us glitter like Christmas trees. And we had a half-inch dead-air space under positive pressure between the two layers. Warning thermocouples, of course—at 770 degrees, it wouldn’t take much time to fry us to cinders if the suits failed somewhere.” “How about the Bugs?” “They were insulated, too, but we weren’t counting on them too much for protection.” “You weren’t!” Baron exclaimed. “Why not?” “We’d be in and out of them too much. They gave us mobility and storage, but we knew we’d have to do a lot of forward work on foot.” Claney smiled bitterly. “Which meant that we had an inch of fiberglass and a half-inch of dead air between us and a surface temperature where lead flowed like water and zinc was almost at melting point and the pools of sulfur in the shadows were boiling like oatmeal over a campfire.” Baron licked his lips. His fingers stroked the cool, wet glass as he set it down on the tablecloth. “Go on,” he said tautly. “You started on schedule?” “Oh, yes,” said Claney, “we started on schedule, all right. We just didn’t quite end on schedule, that was all. But I’m getting to that.” He settled back in his chair and continued. We jumped off from Twilight on a course due southeast with thirty days to make it to the Center of Brightside. If we could cross an average of seventy miles a day, we could hit Center exactly at perihelion, the point of Mercury’s closest approach to the Sun—which made Center the hottest part of the planet at the hottest it ever gets. The Sun was already huge and yellow over the horizon when we started, twice the size it appears on Earth. Every day that Sun would grow bigger and whiter, and every day the surface would get hotter. But once we reached Center, the job was only half done—we would still have to travel another two thousand miles to the opposite twilight zone. Sanderson was to meet us on the other side in the Laboratory’s scout ship, approximately sixty days from the time we jumped off. That was the plan, in outline. It was up to us to cross those seventy miles a day, no matter how hot it became, no matter what terrain we had to cross. Detours would be dangerous and time-consuming. Delays could cost us our lives. We all knew that. The Major briefed us on details an hour before we left. “Peter, you’ll take the lead Bug, the small one we stripped down for you. Stone and I will flank you on either side, giving you a hundred-yard lead. McIvers, you’ll have the job of dragging the sledges, so we’ll have to direct your course pretty closely. Peter’s job is to pick the passage at any given point. If there’s any doubt of safe passage, we’ll all explore ahead on foot before we risk the Bugs. Got that?” McIvers and Stone exchanged glances. McIvers said: “Jack and I were planning to change around. We figured he could take the sledges. That would give me a little more mobility.” The Major looked up sharply at Stone. “Do you buy that, Jack?” Stone shrugged. “I don’t mind. Mac wanted—” McIvers made an impatient gesture with his hands. “It doesn’t matter. I just feel better when I’m on the move. Does it make any difference?” “I guess it doesn’t,” said the Major. “Then you’ll flank Peter along with me. Right?” “Sure, sure.” McIvers pulled at his lower lip. “Who’s going to do the advance scouting?” “It sounds like I am,” I cut in. “We want to keep the lead Bug light as possible.” Mikuta nodded. “That’s right. Peter’s Bug is stripped down to the frame and wheels.” McIvers shook his head. “No, I mean the advance work. You need somebody out ahead—four or five miles, at least—to pick up the big flaws and active surface changes, don’t you?” He stared at the Major. “I mean, how can we tell what sort of a hole we may be moving into, unless we have a scout up ahead?” “That’s what we have the charts for,” the Major said sharply. “Charts! I’m talking about detail work. We don’t need to worry about the major topography. It’s the little faults you can’t see on the pictures that can kill us.” He tossed the charts down excitedly. “Look, let me take a Bug out ahead and work reconnaissance, keep five, maybe ten miles ahead of the column. I can stay on good solid ground, of course, but scan the area closely and radio back to Peter where to avoid the flaws. Then—” “No dice,” the Major broke in. “But why not? We could save ourselves days!” “I don’t care what we could save. We stay together. When we get to the Center, I want live men along with me. That means we stay within easy sight of each other at all times. Any climber knows that everybody is safer in a party than one man alone—any time, any place.” McIvers stared at him, his cheeks an angry red. Finally he gave a sullen nod. “Okay. If you say so.” “Well, I say so and I mean it. I don’t want any fancy stuff. We’re going to hit Center together, and finish the Crossing together. Got that?” McIvers nodded. Mikuta then looked at Stone and me and we nodded, too. “All right,” he said slowly. “Now that we’ve got it straight, let’s go.” It was hot. If I forget everything else about that trek, I’ll never forget that huge yellow Sun glaring down, without a break, hotter and hotter with every mile. We knew that the first few days would be the easiest and we were rested and fresh when we started down the long ragged gorge southeast of the Twilight Lab. I moved out first; back over my shoulder, I could see the Major and McIvers crawling out behind me, their pillow tires taking the rugged floor of the gorge smoothly. Behind them, Stone dragged the sledges. Even at only 30 per cent Earth gravity they were a strain on the big tractor, until the ski-blades bit into the fluffy volcanic ash blanketing the valley. We even had a path to follow for the first twenty miles. I kept my eyes pasted to the big polaroid binocs, picking out the track the early research teams had made out into the edge of Brightside. But in a couple of hours we rumbled past Sanderson’s little outpost observatory and the tracks stopped. We were in virgin territory and already the Sun was beginning to bite. We didn’t feel the heat so much those first days out. We saw it. The refrig units kept our skins at a nice comfortable seventy-five degrees Fahrenheit inside our suits, but our eyes watched that glaring Sun and the baked yellow rocks going past, and some nerve pathways got twisted up, somehow. We poured sweat as if we were in a superheated furnace. We drove eight hours and slept five. When a sleep period came due, we pulled the Bugs together into a square, threw up a light aluminum sun-shield and lay out in the dust and rocks. The sun-shield cut the temperature down sixty or seventy degrees, for whatever help that was. And then we ate from the forward sledge—sucking through tubes—protein, carbohydrates, bulk gelatin, vitamins. The Major measured water out with an iron hand, because we’d have drunk ourselves into nephritis in a week otherwise. We were constantly, unceasingly thirsty. Ask the physiologists and psychiatrists why—they can give you have a dozen interesting reasons—but all we knew, or cared about, was that it happened to be so. We didn’t sleep the first few stops, as a consequence. Our eyes burned in spite of the filters and we had roaring headaches, but we couldn’t sleep them off. We sat around looking at each other. Then McIvers would say how good a beer would taste, and off we’d go. We’d have murdered our grandmothers for one ice-cold bottle of beer. After a few driving periods, I began to get my bearings at the wheel. We were moving down into desolation that made Earth’s old Death Valley look like a Japanese rose garden. Huge sun-baked cracks opened up in the floor of the gorge, with black cliffs jutting up on either side; the air was filled with a barely visible yellowish mist of sulfur and sulfurous gases. It was a hot, barren hole, no place for any man to go, but the challenge was so powerful you could almost feel it. No one had ever crossed this land before and escaped. Those who had tried it had been cruelly punished, but the land was still there, so it had to be crossed. Not the easy way. It had to be crossed the hardest way possible: overland, through anything the land could throw up to us, at the most difficult time possible. Yet we knew that even the land might have been conquered before, except for that Sun. We’d fought absolute cold before and won. We’d never fought heat like this and won. The only worse heat in the Solar System was the surface of the Sun itself. Brightside was worth trying for. We would get it or it would get us. That was the bargain. I learned a lot about Mercury those first few driving periods. The gorge petered out after a hundred miles and we moved onto the slope of a range of ragged craters that ran south and east. This range had shown no activity since the first landing on Mercury forty years before, but beyond it there were active cones. Yellow fumes rose from the craters constantly; their sides were shrouded with heavy ash. We couldn’t detect a wind, but we knew there was a hot, sulfurous breeze sweeping in great continental tides across the face of the planet. Not enough for erosion, though. The craters rose up out of jagged gorges, huge towering spears of rock and rubble. Below were the vast yellow flatlands, smoking and hissing from the gases beneath the crust. Over everything was gray dust—silicates and salts, pumice and limestone and granite ash, filling crevices and declivities—offering a soft, treacherous surface for the Bug’s pillow tires. I learned to read the ground, to tell a covered fault by the sag of the dust; I learned to spot a passable crack, and tell it from an impassable cut. Time after time the Bugs ground to a halt while we explored a passage on foot, tied together with light copper cable, digging, advancing, digging some more until we were sure the surface would carry the machines. It was cruel work; we slept in exhaustion. But it went smoothly, at first. Too smoothly, it seemed to me, and the others seemed to think so, too. McIvers’ restlessness was beginning to grate on our nerves. He talked too much, while we were resting or while we were driving; wisecracks, witticisms, unfunny jokes that wore thin with repetition. He took to making side trips from the route now and then, never far, but a little further each time. Jack Stone reacted quite the opposite; he grew quieter with each stop, more reserved and apprehensive. I didn’t like it, but I figured that it would pass off after a while. I was apprehensive enough myself; I just managed to hide it better. And every mile the Sun got bigger and whiter and higher in the sky and hotter. Without our ultra-violet screens and glare filters we would have been blinded; as it was our eyes ached constantly and the skin on our faces itched and tingled at the end of an eight-hour trek. But it took one of those side trips of McIvers’ to deliver the penultimate blow to our already fraying nerves. He had driven down a side-branch of a long canyon running off west of our route and was almost out of sight in a cloud of ash when we heard a sharp cry through our earphones. I wheeled my Bug around with my heart in my throat and spotted him through the binocs, waving frantically from the top of his machine. The Major and I took off, lumbering down the gulch after him as fast as the Bugs could go, with a thousand horrible pictures racing through our minds.... We found him standing stock-still, pointing down the gorge and, for once, he didn’t have anything to say. It was the wreck of a Bug; an old-fashioned half-track model of the sort that hadn’t been in use for years. It was wedged tight in a cut in the rock, an axle broken, its casing split wide open up the middle, half-buried in a rock slide. A dozen feet away were two insulated suits with white bones gleaming through the fiberglass helmets. This was as far as Wyatt and Carpenter had gotten on their Brightside Crossing. On the fifth driving period out, the terrain began to change. It looked the same, but every now and then it felt different. On two occasions I felt my wheels spin, with a howl of protest from my engine. Then, quite suddenly, the Bug gave a lurch; I gunned my motor and nothing happened. I could see the dull gray stuff seeping up around the hubs, thick and tenacious, splattering around in steaming gobs as the wheels spun. I knew what had happened the moment the wheels gave and, a few minutes later, they chained me to the tractor and dragged me back out of the mire. It looked for all the world like thick gray mud, but it was a pit of molten lead, steaming under a soft layer of concealing ash. I picked my way more cautiously then. We were getting into an area of recent surface activity; the surface was really treacherous. I caught myself wishing that the Major had okayed McIvers’ scheme for an advanced scout; more dangerous for the individual, maybe, but I was driving blind now and I didn’t like it. One error in judgment could sink us all, but I wasn’t thinking much about the others. I was worried about me , plenty worried. I kept thinking, better McIvers should go than me. It wasn’t healthy thinking and I knew it, but I couldn’t get the thought out of my mind. It was a grueling eight hours and we slept poorly. Back in the Bug again, we moved still more slowly—edging out on a broad flat plateau, dodging a network of gaping surface cracks—winding back and forth in an effort to keep the machines on solid rock. I couldn’t see far ahead, because of the yellow haze rising from the cracks, so I was almost on top of it when I saw a sharp cut ahead where the surface dropped six feet beyond a deep crack. I let out a shout to halt the others; then I edged my Bug forward, peering at the cleft. It was deep and wide. I moved fifty yards to the left, then back to the right. There was only one place that looked like a possible crossing; a long, narrow ledge of gray stuff that lay down across a section of the fault like a ramp. Even as I watched it, I could feel the surface crust under the Bug trembling and saw the ledge shift over a few feet.

Describe the setting of the story.

1

The story begins at Red Lion, a place with few patrons. A doorman is in charge of the comings and goings. Several climbers are conversing, including Andean climbers and the first man to cross the Vulcan Crater on Venus. Claney then dives into his story about his trip to cross the Brightside of Mercury. The men meet up for their trip at the Twilight Lab near the north pole of the planet. The lab has a rocket landing and a lab, and much of it is deep in the crust of the planet where it is cooler. There is also a tower that houses the Solar ‘scope. Sanderson, the lab’s manager, is a sun researcher, so his lab is located at the closest reasonable spot to the sun. Its position between the Brightside and the Darkside means that the temperatures only fluctuate about 50-60 degrees. Mercury is situated on an axis, and the part that turns in faces the sun. This area, the perihelion, is the hottest place in the solar system besides the actual surface of the sun. Here, the temperatures soar to 770 degrees fahrenheit. The surface of Mercury is particularly treacherous. There are many active volcanoes, and the ground shifts frequently, creating cracks and craters that are difficult to see and impossible to cross. The gases present are also dangerous, including CO 2, nitrogen, sulfur vapor, and sulfur dioxide. There is liquid lead and boiling pools of sulfur. On Mercury, the sun appears to be twice as big as it does on Earth. The planet only has 30% of the gravity that Earth does, and it is blanketed with gray ash. Huge cracks in the surface appear out of nowhere, and cliffs rise out of the land, and rocks and rubble and molten lead make driving treacherous. Everything is difficult to see because of the sulfur mist and the volcanic ash. Without filters and screens, humans would be instantly blinded by the light from the sun. There is a deep gorge where the bodies of Wyatt and Carpenter, two famous explorers who attempted to cross The Brightside, lie. Their outdated Bugs crashed there, presumably because they misjudged the surface and did not see the crack in the lan

49165

Brightside Crossing by Alan E. Nourse JAMES BARON was not pleased to hear that he had had a visitor when he reached the Red Lion that evening. He had no stomach for mysteries, vast or trifling, and there were pressing things to think about at this time. Yet the doorman had flagged him as he came in from the street: “A thousand pardons, Mr. Baron. The gentleman—he would leave no name. He said you’d want to see him. He will be back by eight.” Now Baron drummed his fingers on the table top, staring about the quiet lounge. Street trade was discouraged at the Red Lion, gently but persuasively; the patrons were few in number. Across to the right was a group that Baron knew vaguely—Andean climbers, or at least two of them were. Over near the door he recognized old Balmer, who had mapped the first passage to the core of Vulcan Crater on Venus. Baron returned his smile with a nod. Then he settled back and waited impatiently for the intruder who demanded his time without justifying it. Presently a small, grizzled man crossed the room and sat down at Baron’s table. He was short and wiry. His face held no key to his age—he might have been thirty or a thousand—but he looked weary and immensely ugly. His cheeks and forehead were twisted and brown, with scars that were still healing. The stranger said, “I’m glad you waited. I’ve heard you’re planning to attempt the Brightside.” Baron stared at the man for a moment. “I see you can read telecasts,” he said coldly. “The news was correct. We are going to make a Brightside Crossing.” “At perihelion?” “Of course. When else?” The grizzled man searched Baron’s face for a moment without expression. Then he said slowly, “No, I’m afraid you’re not going to make the Crossing.” “Say, who are you, if you don’t mind?” Baron demanded. “The name is Claney,” said the stranger. There was a silence. Then: “Claney? Peter Claney?” “That’s right.” Baron’s eyes were wide with excitement, all trace of anger gone. “Great balls of fire, man— where have you been hiding? We’ve been trying to contact you for months!” “I know. I was hoping you’d quit looking and chuck the whole idea.” “Quit looking!” Baron bent forward over the table. “My friend, we’d given up hope, but we’ve never quit looking. Here, have a drink. There’s so much you can tell us.” His fingers were trembling. Peter Claney shook his head. “I can’t tell you anything you want to hear.” “But you’ve got to. You’re the only man on Earth who’s attempted a Brightside Crossing and lived through it! And the story you cleared for the news—it was nothing. We need details . Where did your equipment fall down? Where did you miscalculate? What were the trouble spots?” Baron jabbed a finger at Claney’s face. “That, for instance—epithelioma? Why? What was wrong with your glass? Your filters? We’ve got to know those things. If you can tell us, we can make it across where your attempt failed—” “You want to know why we failed?” asked Claney. “Of course we want to know. We have to know.” “It’s simple. We failed because it can’t be done. We couldn’t do it and neither can you. No human beings will ever cross the Brightside alive, not if they try for centuries.” “Nonsense,” Baron declared. “We will.” Claney shrugged. “I was there. I know what I’m saying. You can blame the equipment or the men—there were flaws in both quarters—but we just didn’t know what we were fighting. It was the planet that whipped us, that and the Sun . They’ll whip you, too, if you try it.” “Never,” said Baron. “Let me tell you,” Peter Claney said. I’d been interested in the Brightside for almost as long as I can remember (Claney said). I guess I was about ten when Wyatt and Carpenter made the last attempt—that was in 2082, I think. I followed the news stories like a tri-V serial and then I was heartbroken when they just disappeared. I know now that they were a pair of idiots, starting off without proper equipment, with practically no knowledge of surface conditions, without any charts—they couldn’t have made a hundred miles—but I didn’t know that then and it was a terrible tragedy. After that, I followed Sanderson’s work in the Twilight Lab up there and began to get Brightside into my blood, sure as death. But it was Mikuta’s idea to attempt a Crossing. Did you ever know Tom Mikuta? I don’t suppose you did. No, not Japanese—Polish-American. He was a major in the Interplanetary Service for some years and hung onto the title after he gave up his commission. He was with Armstrong on Mars during his Service days, did a good deal of the original mapping and surveying for the Colony there. I first met him on Venus; we spent five years together up there doing some of the nastiest exploring since the Matto Grasso. Then he made the attempt on Vulcan Crater that paved the way for Balmer a few years later. I’d always liked the Major—he was big and quiet and cool, the sort of guy who always had things figured a little further ahead than anyone else and always knew what to do in a tight place. Too many men in this game are all nerve and luck, with no judgment. The Major had both. He also had the kind of personality that could take a crew of wild men and make them work like a well-oiled machine across a thousand miles of Venus jungle. I liked him and I trusted him. He contacted me in New York and he was very casual at first. We spent an evening here at the Red Lion, talking about old times; he told me about the Vulcan business, and how he’d been out to see Sanderson and the Twilight Lab on Mercury, and how he preferred a hot trek to a cold one any day of the year—and then he wanted to know what I’d been doing since Venus and what my plans were. “No particular plans,” I told him. “Why?” He looked me over. “How much do you weigh, Peter?” I told him one-thirty-five. “That much!” he said. “Well, there can’t be much fat on you, at any rate. How do you take heat?” “You should know,” I said. “Venus was no icebox.” “No, I mean real heat.” Then I began to get it. “You’re planning a trip.” “That’s right. A hot trip.” He grinned at me. “Might be dangerous, too.” “What trip?” “Brightside of Mercury,” the Major said. I whistled cautiously. “At aphelion?” He threw his head back. “Why try a Crossing at aphelion? What have you done then? Four thousand miles of butcherous heat, just to have some joker come along, use your data and drum you out of the glory by crossing at perihelion forty-four days later? No, thanks. I want the Brightside without any nonsense about it.” He leaned across me eagerly. “I want to make a Crossing at perihelion and I want to cross on the surface. If a man can do that, he’s got Mercury. Until then, nobody’s got Mercury. I want Mercury—but I’ll need help getting it.” I’d thought of it a thousand times and never dared consider it. Nobody had, since Wyatt and Carpenter disappeared. Mercury turns on its axis in the same time that it wheels around the Sun, which means that the Brightside is always facing in. That makes the Brightside of Mercury at perihelion the hottest place in the Solar System, with one single exception: the surface of the Sun itself. It would be a hellish trek. Only a few men had ever learned just how hellish and they never came back to tell about it. It was a real hell’s Crossing, but someday, I thought, somebody would cross it. I wanted to be along. The Twilight Lab, near the northern pole of Mercury, was the obvious jumping-off place. The setup there wasn’t very extensive—a rocket landing, the labs and quarters for Sanderson’s crew sunk deep into the crust, and the tower that housed the Solar ’scope that Sanderson had built up there ten years before. Twilight Lab wasn’t particularly interested in the Brightside, of course—the Sun was Sanderson’s baby and he’d picked Mercury as the closest chunk of rock to the Sun that could hold his observatory. He’d chosen a good location, too. On Mercury, the Brightside temperature hits 770° F. at perihelion and the Darkside runs pretty constant at -410° F. No permanent installation with a human crew could survive at either extreme. But with Mercury’s wobble, the twilight zone between Brightside and Darkside offers something closer to survival temperatures. Sanderson built the Lab up near the pole, where the zone is about five miles wide, so the temperature only varies 50 to 60 degrees with the libration. The Solar ’scope could take that much change and they’d get good clear observation of the Sun for about seventy out of the eighty-eight days it takes the planet to wheel around. The Major was counting on Sanderson knowing something about Mercury as well as the Sun when we camped at the Lab to make final preparations. Sanderson did. He thought we’d lost our minds and he said so, but he gave us all the help he could. He spent a week briefing Jack Stone, the third member of our party, who had arrived with the supplies and equipment a few days earlier. Poor Jack met us at the rocket landing almost bawling, Sanderson had given him such a gloomy picture of what Brightside was like. Stone was a youngster—hardly twenty-five, I’d say—but he’d been with the Major at Vulcan and had begged to join this trek. I had a funny feeling that Jack really didn’t care for exploring too much, but he thought Mikuta was God, followed him around like a puppy. It didn’t matter to me as long as he knew what he was getting in for. You don’t go asking people in this game why they do it—they’re liable to get awfully uneasy and none of them can ever give you an answer that makes sense. Anyway, Stone had borrowed three men from the Lab, and had the supplies and equipment all lined up when we got there, ready to check and test. We dug right in. With plenty of funds—tri-V money and some government cash the Major had talked his way around—our equipment was new and good. Mikuta had done the designing and testing himself, with a big assist from Sanderson. We had four Bugs, three of them the light pillow-tire models, with special lead-cooled cut-in engines when the heat set in, and one heavy-duty tractor model for pulling the sledges. The Major went over them like a kid at the circus. Then he said, “Have you heard anything from McIvers?” “Who’s he?” Stone wanted to know. “He’ll be joining us. He’s a good man—got quite a name for climbing, back home.” The Major turned to me. “You’ve probably heard of him.” I’d heard plenty of stories about Ted McIvers and I wasn’t too happy to hear that he was joining us. “Kind of a daredevil, isn’t he?” “Maybe. He’s lucky and skillful. Where do you draw the line? We’ll need plenty of both.” “Have you ever worked with him?” I asked. “No. Are you worried?” “Not exactly. But Brightside is no place to count on luck.” The Major laughed. “I don’t think we need to worry about McIvers. We understood each other when I talked up the trip to him and we’re going to need each other too much to do any fooling around.” He turned back to the supply list. “Meanwhile, let’s get this stuff listed and packed. We’ll need to cut weight sharply and our time is short. Sanderson says we should leave in three days.” Two days later, McIvers hadn’t arrived. The Major didn’t say much about it. Stone was getting edgy and so was I. We spent the second day studying charts of the Brightside, such as they were. The best available were pretty poor, taken from so far out that the detail dissolved into blurs on blow-up. They showed the biggest ranges of peaks and craters and faults, and that was all. Still, we could use them to plan a broad outline of our course. “This range here,” the Major said as we crowded around the board, “is largely inactive, according to Sanderson. But these to the south and west could be active. Seismograph tracings suggest a lot of activity in that region, getting worse down toward the equator—not only volcanic, but sub-surface shifting.” Stone nodded. “Sanderson told me there was probably constant surface activity.” The Major shrugged. “Well, it’s treacherous, there’s no doubt of it. But the only way to avoid it is to travel over the Pole, which would lose us days and offer us no guarantee of less activity to the west. Now we might avoid some if we could find a pass through this range and cut sharp east—” It seemed that the more we considered the problem, the further we got from a solution. We knew there were active volcanoes on the Brightside—even on the Darkside, though surface activity there was pretty much slowed down and localized. But there were problems of atmosphere on Brightside, as well. There was an atmosphere and a constant atmospheric flow from Brightside to Darkside. Not much—the lighter gases had reached escape velocity and disappeared from Brightside millennia ago—but there was CO 2 , and nitrogen, and traces of other heavier gases. There was also an abundance of sulfur vapor, as well as carbon disulfide and sulfur dioxide. The atmospheric tide moved toward the Darkside, where it condensed, carrying enough volcanic ash with it for Sanderson to estimate the depth and nature of the surface upheavals on Brightside from his samplings. The trick was to find a passage that avoided those upheavals as far as possible. But in the final analysis, we were barely scraping the surface. The only way we would find out what was happening where was to be there. Finally, on the third day, McIvers blew in on a freight rocket from Venus. He’d missed the ship that the Major and I had taken by a few hours, and had conned his way to Venus in hopes of getting a hop from there. He didn’t seem too upset about it, as though this were his usual way of doing things and he couldn’t see why everyone should get so excited. He was a tall, rangy man with long, wavy hair prematurely gray, and the sort of eyes that looked like a climber’s—half-closed, sleepy, almost indolent, but capable of abrupt alertness. And he never stood still; he was always moving, always doing something with his hands, or talking, or pacing about. Evidently the Major decided not to press the issue of his arrival. There was still work to do, and an hour later we were running the final tests on the pressure suits. That evening, Stone and McIvers were thick as thieves, and everything was set for an early departure after we got some rest. “And that,” said Baron, finishing his drink and signaling the waiter for another pair, “was your first big mistake.” Peter Claney raised his eyebrows. “McIvers?” “Of course.” Claney shrugged, glanced at the small quiet tables around them. “There are lots of bizarre personalities around a place like this, and some of the best wouldn’t seem to be the most reliable at first glance. Anyway, personality problems weren’t our big problem right then. Equipment worried us first and route next.” Baron nodded in agreement. “What kind of suits did you have?” “The best insulating suits ever made,” said Claney. “Each one had an inner lining of a fiberglass modification, to avoid the clumsiness of asbestos, and carried the refrigerating unit and oxygen storage which we recharged from the sledges every eight hours. Outer layer carried a monomolecular chrome reflecting surface that made us glitter like Christmas trees. And we had a half-inch dead-air space under positive pressure between the two layers. Warning thermocouples, of course—at 770 degrees, it wouldn’t take much time to fry us to cinders if the suits failed somewhere.” “How about the Bugs?” “They were insulated, too, but we weren’t counting on them too much for protection.” “You weren’t!” Baron exclaimed. “Why not?” “We’d be in and out of them too much. They gave us mobility and storage, but we knew we’d have to do a lot of forward work on foot.” Claney smiled bitterly. “Which meant that we had an inch of fiberglass and a half-inch of dead air between us and a surface temperature where lead flowed like water and zinc was almost at melting point and the pools of sulfur in the shadows were boiling like oatmeal over a campfire.” Baron licked his lips. His fingers stroked the cool, wet glass as he set it down on the tablecloth. “Go on,” he said tautly. “You started on schedule?” “Oh, yes,” said Claney, “we started on schedule, all right. We just didn’t quite end on schedule, that was all. But I’m getting to that.” He settled back in his chair and continued. We jumped off from Twilight on a course due southeast with thirty days to make it to the Center of Brightside. If we could cross an average of seventy miles a day, we could hit Center exactly at perihelion, the point of Mercury’s closest approach to the Sun—which made Center the hottest part of the planet at the hottest it ever gets. The Sun was already huge and yellow over the horizon when we started, twice the size it appears on Earth. Every day that Sun would grow bigger and whiter, and every day the surface would get hotter. But once we reached Center, the job was only half done—we would still have to travel another two thousand miles to the opposite twilight zone. Sanderson was to meet us on the other side in the Laboratory’s scout ship, approximately sixty days from the time we jumped off. That was the plan, in outline. It was up to us to cross those seventy miles a day, no matter how hot it became, no matter what terrain we had to cross. Detours would be dangerous and time-consuming. Delays could cost us our lives. We all knew that. The Major briefed us on details an hour before we left. “Peter, you’ll take the lead Bug, the small one we stripped down for you. Stone and I will flank you on either side, giving you a hundred-yard lead. McIvers, you’ll have the job of dragging the sledges, so we’ll have to direct your course pretty closely. Peter’s job is to pick the passage at any given point. If there’s any doubt of safe passage, we’ll all explore ahead on foot before we risk the Bugs. Got that?” McIvers and Stone exchanged glances. McIvers said: “Jack and I were planning to change around. We figured he could take the sledges. That would give me a little more mobility.” The Major looked up sharply at Stone. “Do you buy that, Jack?” Stone shrugged. “I don’t mind. Mac wanted—” McIvers made an impatient gesture with his hands. “It doesn’t matter. I just feel better when I’m on the move. Does it make any difference?” “I guess it doesn’t,” said the Major. “Then you’ll flank Peter along with me. Right?” “Sure, sure.” McIvers pulled at his lower lip. “Who’s going to do the advance scouting?” “It sounds like I am,” I cut in. “We want to keep the lead Bug light as possible.” Mikuta nodded. “That’s right. Peter’s Bug is stripped down to the frame and wheels.” McIvers shook his head. “No, I mean the advance work. You need somebody out ahead—four or five miles, at least—to pick up the big flaws and active surface changes, don’t you?” He stared at the Major. “I mean, how can we tell what sort of a hole we may be moving into, unless we have a scout up ahead?” “That’s what we have the charts for,” the Major said sharply. “Charts! I’m talking about detail work. We don’t need to worry about the major topography. It’s the little faults you can’t see on the pictures that can kill us.” He tossed the charts down excitedly. “Look, let me take a Bug out ahead and work reconnaissance, keep five, maybe ten miles ahead of the column. I can stay on good solid ground, of course, but scan the area closely and radio back to Peter where to avoid the flaws. Then—” “No dice,” the Major broke in. “But why not? We could save ourselves days!” “I don’t care what we could save. We stay together. When we get to the Center, I want live men along with me. That means we stay within easy sight of each other at all times. Any climber knows that everybody is safer in a party than one man alone—any time, any place.” McIvers stared at him, his cheeks an angry red. Finally he gave a sullen nod. “Okay. If you say so.” “Well, I say so and I mean it. I don’t want any fancy stuff. We’re going to hit Center together, and finish the Crossing together. Got that?” McIvers nodded. Mikuta then looked at Stone and me and we nodded, too. “All right,” he said slowly. “Now that we’ve got it straight, let’s go.” It was hot. If I forget everything else about that trek, I’ll never forget that huge yellow Sun glaring down, without a break, hotter and hotter with every mile. We knew that the first few days would be the easiest and we were rested and fresh when we started down the long ragged gorge southeast of the Twilight Lab. I moved out first; back over my shoulder, I could see the Major and McIvers crawling out behind me, their pillow tires taking the rugged floor of the gorge smoothly. Behind them, Stone dragged the sledges. Even at only 30 per cent Earth gravity they were a strain on the big tractor, until the ski-blades bit into the fluffy volcanic ash blanketing the valley. We even had a path to follow for the first twenty miles. I kept my eyes pasted to the big polaroid binocs, picking out the track the early research teams had made out into the edge of Brightside. But in a couple of hours we rumbled past Sanderson’s little outpost observatory and the tracks stopped. We were in virgin territory and already the Sun was beginning to bite. We didn’t feel the heat so much those first days out. We saw it. The refrig units kept our skins at a nice comfortable seventy-five degrees Fahrenheit inside our suits, but our eyes watched that glaring Sun and the baked yellow rocks going past, and some nerve pathways got twisted up, somehow. We poured sweat as if we were in a superheated furnace. We drove eight hours and slept five. When a sleep period came due, we pulled the Bugs together into a square, threw up a light aluminum sun-shield and lay out in the dust and rocks. The sun-shield cut the temperature down sixty or seventy degrees, for whatever help that was. And then we ate from the forward sledge—sucking through tubes—protein, carbohydrates, bulk gelatin, vitamins. The Major measured water out with an iron hand, because we’d have drunk ourselves into nephritis in a week otherwise. We were constantly, unceasingly thirsty. Ask the physiologists and psychiatrists why—they can give you have a dozen interesting reasons—but all we knew, or cared about, was that it happened to be so. We didn’t sleep the first few stops, as a consequence. Our eyes burned in spite of the filters and we had roaring headaches, but we couldn’t sleep them off. We sat around looking at each other. Then McIvers would say how good a beer would taste, and off we’d go. We’d have murdered our grandmothers for one ice-cold bottle of beer. After a few driving periods, I began to get my bearings at the wheel. We were moving down into desolation that made Earth’s old Death Valley look like a Japanese rose garden. Huge sun-baked cracks opened up in the floor of the gorge, with black cliffs jutting up on either side; the air was filled with a barely visible yellowish mist of sulfur and sulfurous gases. It was a hot, barren hole, no place for any man to go, but the challenge was so powerful you could almost feel it. No one had ever crossed this land before and escaped. Those who had tried it had been cruelly punished, but the land was still there, so it had to be crossed. Not the easy way. It had to be crossed the hardest way possible: overland, through anything the land could throw up to us, at the most difficult time possible. Yet we knew that even the land might have been conquered before, except for that Sun. We’d fought absolute cold before and won. We’d never fought heat like this and won. The only worse heat in the Solar System was the surface of the Sun itself. Brightside was worth trying for. We would get it or it would get us. That was the bargain. I learned a lot about Mercury those first few driving periods. The gorge petered out after a hundred miles and we moved onto the slope of a range of ragged craters that ran south and east. This range had shown no activity since the first landing on Mercury forty years before, but beyond it there were active cones. Yellow fumes rose from the craters constantly; their sides were shrouded with heavy ash. We couldn’t detect a wind, but we knew there was a hot, sulfurous breeze sweeping in great continental tides across the face of the planet. Not enough for erosion, though. The craters rose up out of jagged gorges, huge towering spears of rock and rubble. Below were the vast yellow flatlands, smoking and hissing from the gases beneath the crust. Over everything was gray dust—silicates and salts, pumice and limestone and granite ash, filling crevices and declivities—offering a soft, treacherous surface for the Bug’s pillow tires. I learned to read the ground, to tell a covered fault by the sag of the dust; I learned to spot a passable crack, and tell it from an impassable cut. Time after time the Bugs ground to a halt while we explored a passage on foot, tied together with light copper cable, digging, advancing, digging some more until we were sure the surface would carry the machines. It was cruel work; we slept in exhaustion. But it went smoothly, at first. Too smoothly, it seemed to me, and the others seemed to think so, too. McIvers’ restlessness was beginning to grate on our nerves. He talked too much, while we were resting or while we were driving; wisecracks, witticisms, unfunny jokes that wore thin with repetition. He took to making side trips from the route now and then, never far, but a little further each time. Jack Stone reacted quite the opposite; he grew quieter with each stop, more reserved and apprehensive. I didn’t like it, but I figured that it would pass off after a while. I was apprehensive enough myself; I just managed to hide it better. And every mile the Sun got bigger and whiter and higher in the sky and hotter. Without our ultra-violet screens and glare filters we would have been blinded; as it was our eyes ached constantly and the skin on our faces itched and tingled at the end of an eight-hour trek. But it took one of those side trips of McIvers’ to deliver the penultimate blow to our already fraying nerves. He had driven down a side-branch of a long canyon running off west of our route and was almost out of sight in a cloud of ash when we heard a sharp cry through our earphones. I wheeled my Bug around with my heart in my throat and spotted him through the binocs, waving frantically from the top of his machine. The Major and I took off, lumbering down the gulch after him as fast as the Bugs could go, with a thousand horrible pictures racing through our minds.... We found him standing stock-still, pointing down the gorge and, for once, he didn’t have anything to say. It was the wreck of a Bug; an old-fashioned half-track model of the sort that hadn’t been in use for years. It was wedged tight in a cut in the rock, an axle broken, its casing split wide open up the middle, half-buried in a rock slide. A dozen feet away were two insulated suits with white bones gleaming through the fiberglass helmets. This was as far as Wyatt and Carpenter had gotten on their Brightside Crossing. On the fifth driving period out, the terrain began to change. It looked the same, but every now and then it felt different. On two occasions I felt my wheels spin, with a howl of protest from my engine. Then, quite suddenly, the Bug gave a lurch; I gunned my motor and nothing happened. I could see the dull gray stuff seeping up around the hubs, thick and tenacious, splattering around in steaming gobs as the wheels spun. I knew what had happened the moment the wheels gave and, a few minutes later, they chained me to the tractor and dragged me back out of the mire. It looked for all the world like thick gray mud, but it was a pit of molten lead, steaming under a soft layer of concealing ash. I picked my way more cautiously then. We were getting into an area of recent surface activity; the surface was really treacherous. I caught myself wishing that the Major had okayed McIvers’ scheme for an advanced scout; more dangerous for the individual, maybe, but I was driving blind now and I didn’t like it. One error in judgment could sink us all, but I wasn’t thinking much about the others. I was worried about me , plenty worried. I kept thinking, better McIvers should go than me. It wasn’t healthy thinking and I knew it, but I couldn’t get the thought out of my mind. It was a grueling eight hours and we slept poorly. Back in the Bug again, we moved still more slowly—edging out on a broad flat plateau, dodging a network of gaping surface cracks—winding back and forth in an effort to keep the machines on solid rock. I couldn’t see far ahead, because of the yellow haze rising from the cracks, so I was almost on top of it when I saw a sharp cut ahead where the surface dropped six feet beyond a deep crack. I let out a shout to halt the others; then I edged my Bug forward, peering at the cleft. It was deep and wide. I moved fifty yards to the left, then back to the right. There was only one place that looked like a possible crossing; a long, narrow ledge of gray stuff that lay down across a section of the fault like a ramp. Even as I watched it, I could feel the surface crust under the Bug trembling and saw the ledge shift over a few feet.

What is the significance of the Brightside Crossing?

6

The Brightside Crossing is an undiscovered portion of Mercury. It is the closest planet to the sun, and the Brightside is the surface that is face-to-face with the surface of the sun most of the time, thanks to Mercury’s quick orbit. It is an incredibly dangerous area of Mercury, with temperatures reaching up to 770 degrees Fahrenheit, possibly more. Because of the difficult atmosphere, the presence of dangerous gases, treacherous landscape, and the heat, the Brightside Crossing remained undiscovered and uninhabitable for hundreds of years. Major Tom Mikuta decided to follow in the footsteps of Wyatt and Carpenter and take on the challenge. The promise of power and discovery draws the main characters forward, as well as the idea of being the first. Mikuta claims that if he were to make the crossing, Mercury would be his. The challenge of the Brightside Crossing is the origin of their desire.

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Brightside Crossing by Alan E. Nourse JAMES BARON was not pleased to hear that he had had a visitor when he reached the Red Lion that evening. He had no stomach for mysteries, vast or trifling, and there were pressing things to think about at this time. Yet the doorman had flagged him as he came in from the street: “A thousand pardons, Mr. Baron. The gentleman—he would leave no name. He said you’d want to see him. He will be back by eight.” Now Baron drummed his fingers on the table top, staring about the quiet lounge. Street trade was discouraged at the Red Lion, gently but persuasively; the patrons were few in number. Across to the right was a group that Baron knew vaguely—Andean climbers, or at least two of them were. Over near the door he recognized old Balmer, who had mapped the first passage to the core of Vulcan Crater on Venus. Baron returned his smile with a nod. Then he settled back and waited impatiently for the intruder who demanded his time without justifying it. Presently a small, grizzled man crossed the room and sat down at Baron’s table. He was short and wiry. His face held no key to his age—he might have been thirty or a thousand—but he looked weary and immensely ugly. His cheeks and forehead were twisted and brown, with scars that were still healing. The stranger said, “I’m glad you waited. I’ve heard you’re planning to attempt the Brightside.” Baron stared at the man for a moment. “I see you can read telecasts,” he said coldly. “The news was correct. We are going to make a Brightside Crossing.” “At perihelion?” “Of course. When else?” The grizzled man searched Baron’s face for a moment without expression. Then he said slowly, “No, I’m afraid you’re not going to make the Crossing.” “Say, who are you, if you don’t mind?” Baron demanded. “The name is Claney,” said the stranger. There was a silence. Then: “Claney? Peter Claney?” “That’s right.” Baron’s eyes were wide with excitement, all trace of anger gone. “Great balls of fire, man— where have you been hiding? We’ve been trying to contact you for months!” “I know. I was hoping you’d quit looking and chuck the whole idea.” “Quit looking!” Baron bent forward over the table. “My friend, we’d given up hope, but we’ve never quit looking. Here, have a drink. There’s so much you can tell us.” His fingers were trembling. Peter Claney shook his head. “I can’t tell you anything you want to hear.” “But you’ve got to. You’re the only man on Earth who’s attempted a Brightside Crossing and lived through it! And the story you cleared for the news—it was nothing. We need details . Where did your equipment fall down? Where did you miscalculate? What were the trouble spots?” Baron jabbed a finger at Claney’s face. “That, for instance—epithelioma? Why? What was wrong with your glass? Your filters? We’ve got to know those things. If you can tell us, we can make it across where your attempt failed—” “You want to know why we failed?” asked Claney. “Of course we want to know. We have to know.” “It’s simple. We failed because it can’t be done. We couldn’t do it and neither can you. No human beings will ever cross the Brightside alive, not if they try for centuries.” “Nonsense,” Baron declared. “We will.” Claney shrugged. “I was there. I know what I’m saying. You can blame the equipment or the men—there were flaws in both quarters—but we just didn’t know what we were fighting. It was the planet that whipped us, that and the Sun . They’ll whip you, too, if you try it.” “Never,” said Baron. “Let me tell you,” Peter Claney said. I’d been interested in the Brightside for almost as long as I can remember (Claney said). I guess I was about ten when Wyatt and Carpenter made the last attempt—that was in 2082, I think. I followed the news stories like a tri-V serial and then I was heartbroken when they just disappeared. I know now that they were a pair of idiots, starting off without proper equipment, with practically no knowledge of surface conditions, without any charts—they couldn’t have made a hundred miles—but I didn’t know that then and it was a terrible tragedy. After that, I followed Sanderson’s work in the Twilight Lab up there and began to get Brightside into my blood, sure as death. But it was Mikuta’s idea to attempt a Crossing. Did you ever know Tom Mikuta? I don’t suppose you did. No, not Japanese—Polish-American. He was a major in the Interplanetary Service for some years and hung onto the title after he gave up his commission. He was with Armstrong on Mars during his Service days, did a good deal of the original mapping and surveying for the Colony there. I first met him on Venus; we spent five years together up there doing some of the nastiest exploring since the Matto Grasso. Then he made the attempt on Vulcan Crater that paved the way for Balmer a few years later. I’d always liked the Major—he was big and quiet and cool, the sort of guy who always had things figured a little further ahead than anyone else and always knew what to do in a tight place. Too many men in this game are all nerve and luck, with no judgment. The Major had both. He also had the kind of personality that could take a crew of wild men and make them work like a well-oiled machine across a thousand miles of Venus jungle. I liked him and I trusted him. He contacted me in New York and he was very casual at first. We spent an evening here at the Red Lion, talking about old times; he told me about the Vulcan business, and how he’d been out to see Sanderson and the Twilight Lab on Mercury, and how he preferred a hot trek to a cold one any day of the year—and then he wanted to know what I’d been doing since Venus and what my plans were. “No particular plans,” I told him. “Why?” He looked me over. “How much do you weigh, Peter?” I told him one-thirty-five. “That much!” he said. “Well, there can’t be much fat on you, at any rate. How do you take heat?” “You should know,” I said. “Venus was no icebox.” “No, I mean real heat.” Then I began to get it. “You’re planning a trip.” “That’s right. A hot trip.” He grinned at me. “Might be dangerous, too.” “What trip?” “Brightside of Mercury,” the Major said. I whistled cautiously. “At aphelion?” He threw his head back. “Why try a Crossing at aphelion? What have you done then? Four thousand miles of butcherous heat, just to have some joker come along, use your data and drum you out of the glory by crossing at perihelion forty-four days later? No, thanks. I want the Brightside without any nonsense about it.” He leaned across me eagerly. “I want to make a Crossing at perihelion and I want to cross on the surface. If a man can do that, he’s got Mercury. Until then, nobody’s got Mercury. I want Mercury—but I’ll need help getting it.” I’d thought of it a thousand times and never dared consider it. Nobody had, since Wyatt and Carpenter disappeared. Mercury turns on its axis in the same time that it wheels around the Sun, which means that the Brightside is always facing in. That makes the Brightside of Mercury at perihelion the hottest place in the Solar System, with one single exception: the surface of the Sun itself. It would be a hellish trek. Only a few men had ever learned just how hellish and they never came back to tell about it. It was a real hell’s Crossing, but someday, I thought, somebody would cross it. I wanted to be along. The Twilight Lab, near the northern pole of Mercury, was the obvious jumping-off place. The setup there wasn’t very extensive—a rocket landing, the labs and quarters for Sanderson’s crew sunk deep into the crust, and the tower that housed the Solar ’scope that Sanderson had built up there ten years before. Twilight Lab wasn’t particularly interested in the Brightside, of course—the Sun was Sanderson’s baby and he’d picked Mercury as the closest chunk of rock to the Sun that could hold his observatory. He’d chosen a good location, too. On Mercury, the Brightside temperature hits 770° F. at perihelion and the Darkside runs pretty constant at -410° F. No permanent installation with a human crew could survive at either extreme. But with Mercury’s wobble, the twilight zone between Brightside and Darkside offers something closer to survival temperatures. Sanderson built the Lab up near the pole, where the zone is about five miles wide, so the temperature only varies 50 to 60 degrees with the libration. The Solar ’scope could take that much change and they’d get good clear observation of the Sun for about seventy out of the eighty-eight days it takes the planet to wheel around. The Major was counting on Sanderson knowing something about Mercury as well as the Sun when we camped at the Lab to make final preparations. Sanderson did. He thought we’d lost our minds and he said so, but he gave us all the help he could. He spent a week briefing Jack Stone, the third member of our party, who had arrived with the supplies and equipment a few days earlier. Poor Jack met us at the rocket landing almost bawling, Sanderson had given him such a gloomy picture of what Brightside was like. Stone was a youngster—hardly twenty-five, I’d say—but he’d been with the Major at Vulcan and had begged to join this trek. I had a funny feeling that Jack really didn’t care for exploring too much, but he thought Mikuta was God, followed him around like a puppy. It didn’t matter to me as long as he knew what he was getting in for. You don’t go asking people in this game why they do it—they’re liable to get awfully uneasy and none of them can ever give you an answer that makes sense. Anyway, Stone had borrowed three men from the Lab, and had the supplies and equipment all lined up when we got there, ready to check and test. We dug right in. With plenty of funds—tri-V money and some government cash the Major had talked his way around—our equipment was new and good. Mikuta had done the designing and testing himself, with a big assist from Sanderson. We had four Bugs, three of them the light pillow-tire models, with special lead-cooled cut-in engines when the heat set in, and one heavy-duty tractor model for pulling the sledges. The Major went over them like a kid at the circus. Then he said, “Have you heard anything from McIvers?” “Who’s he?” Stone wanted to know. “He’ll be joining us. He’s a good man—got quite a name for climbing, back home.” The Major turned to me. “You’ve probably heard of him.” I’d heard plenty of stories about Ted McIvers and I wasn’t too happy to hear that he was joining us. “Kind of a daredevil, isn’t he?” “Maybe. He’s lucky and skillful. Where do you draw the line? We’ll need plenty of both.” “Have you ever worked with him?” I asked. “No. Are you worried?” “Not exactly. But Brightside is no place to count on luck.” The Major laughed. “I don’t think we need to worry about McIvers. We understood each other when I talked up the trip to him and we’re going to need each other too much to do any fooling around.” He turned back to the supply list. “Meanwhile, let’s get this stuff listed and packed. We’ll need to cut weight sharply and our time is short. Sanderson says we should leave in three days.” Two days later, McIvers hadn’t arrived. The Major didn’t say much about it. Stone was getting edgy and so was I. We spent the second day studying charts of the Brightside, such as they were. The best available were pretty poor, taken from so far out that the detail dissolved into blurs on blow-up. They showed the biggest ranges of peaks and craters and faults, and that was all. Still, we could use them to plan a broad outline of our course. “This range here,” the Major said as we crowded around the board, “is largely inactive, according to Sanderson. But these to the south and west could be active. Seismograph tracings suggest a lot of activity in that region, getting worse down toward the equator—not only volcanic, but sub-surface shifting.” Stone nodded. “Sanderson told me there was probably constant surface activity.” The Major shrugged. “Well, it’s treacherous, there’s no doubt of it. But the only way to avoid it is to travel over the Pole, which would lose us days and offer us no guarantee of less activity to the west. Now we might avoid some if we could find a pass through this range and cut sharp east—” It seemed that the more we considered the problem, the further we got from a solution. We knew there were active volcanoes on the Brightside—even on the Darkside, though surface activity there was pretty much slowed down and localized. But there were problems of atmosphere on Brightside, as well. There was an atmosphere and a constant atmospheric flow from Brightside to Darkside. Not much—the lighter gases had reached escape velocity and disappeared from Brightside millennia ago—but there was CO 2 , and nitrogen, and traces of other heavier gases. There was also an abundance of sulfur vapor, as well as carbon disulfide and sulfur dioxide. The atmospheric tide moved toward the Darkside, where it condensed, carrying enough volcanic ash with it for Sanderson to estimate the depth and nature of the surface upheavals on Brightside from his samplings. The trick was to find a passage that avoided those upheavals as far as possible. But in the final analysis, we were barely scraping the surface. The only way we would find out what was happening where was to be there. Finally, on the third day, McIvers blew in on a freight rocket from Venus. He’d missed the ship that the Major and I had taken by a few hours, and had conned his way to Venus in hopes of getting a hop from there. He didn’t seem too upset about it, as though this were his usual way of doing things and he couldn’t see why everyone should get so excited. He was a tall, rangy man with long, wavy hair prematurely gray, and the sort of eyes that looked like a climber’s—half-closed, sleepy, almost indolent, but capable of abrupt alertness. And he never stood still; he was always moving, always doing something with his hands, or talking, or pacing about. Evidently the Major decided not to press the issue of his arrival. There was still work to do, and an hour later we were running the final tests on the pressure suits. That evening, Stone and McIvers were thick as thieves, and everything was set for an early departure after we got some rest. “And that,” said Baron, finishing his drink and signaling the waiter for another pair, “was your first big mistake.” Peter Claney raised his eyebrows. “McIvers?” “Of course.” Claney shrugged, glanced at the small quiet tables around them. “There are lots of bizarre personalities around a place like this, and some of the best wouldn’t seem to be the most reliable at first glance. Anyway, personality problems weren’t our big problem right then. Equipment worried us first and route next.” Baron nodded in agreement. “What kind of suits did you have?” “The best insulating suits ever made,” said Claney. “Each one had an inner lining of a fiberglass modification, to avoid the clumsiness of asbestos, and carried the refrigerating unit and oxygen storage which we recharged from the sledges every eight hours. Outer layer carried a monomolecular chrome reflecting surface that made us glitter like Christmas trees. And we had a half-inch dead-air space under positive pressure between the two layers. Warning thermocouples, of course—at 770 degrees, it wouldn’t take much time to fry us to cinders if the suits failed somewhere.” “How about the Bugs?” “They were insulated, too, but we weren’t counting on them too much for protection.” “You weren’t!” Baron exclaimed. “Why not?” “We’d be in and out of them too much. They gave us mobility and storage, but we knew we’d have to do a lot of forward work on foot.” Claney smiled bitterly. “Which meant that we had an inch of fiberglass and a half-inch of dead air between us and a surface temperature where lead flowed like water and zinc was almost at melting point and the pools of sulfur in the shadows were boiling like oatmeal over a campfire.” Baron licked his lips. His fingers stroked the cool, wet glass as he set it down on the tablecloth. “Go on,” he said tautly. “You started on schedule?” “Oh, yes,” said Claney, “we started on schedule, all right. We just didn’t quite end on schedule, that was all. But I’m getting to that.” He settled back in his chair and continued. We jumped off from Twilight on a course due southeast with thirty days to make it to the Center of Brightside. If we could cross an average of seventy miles a day, we could hit Center exactly at perihelion, the point of Mercury’s closest approach to the Sun—which made Center the hottest part of the planet at the hottest it ever gets. The Sun was already huge and yellow over the horizon when we started, twice the size it appears on Earth. Every day that Sun would grow bigger and whiter, and every day the surface would get hotter. But once we reached Center, the job was only half done—we would still have to travel another two thousand miles to the opposite twilight zone. Sanderson was to meet us on the other side in the Laboratory’s scout ship, approximately sixty days from the time we jumped off. That was the plan, in outline. It was up to us to cross those seventy miles a day, no matter how hot it became, no matter what terrain we had to cross. Detours would be dangerous and time-consuming. Delays could cost us our lives. We all knew that. The Major briefed us on details an hour before we left. “Peter, you’ll take the lead Bug, the small one we stripped down for you. Stone and I will flank you on either side, giving you a hundred-yard lead. McIvers, you’ll have the job of dragging the sledges, so we’ll have to direct your course pretty closely. Peter’s job is to pick the passage at any given point. If there’s any doubt of safe passage, we’ll all explore ahead on foot before we risk the Bugs. Got that?” McIvers and Stone exchanged glances. McIvers said: “Jack and I were planning to change around. We figured he could take the sledges. That would give me a little more mobility.” The Major looked up sharply at Stone. “Do you buy that, Jack?” Stone shrugged. “I don’t mind. Mac wanted—” McIvers made an impatient gesture with his hands. “It doesn’t matter. I just feel better when I’m on the move. Does it make any difference?” “I guess it doesn’t,” said the Major. “Then you’ll flank Peter along with me. Right?” “Sure, sure.” McIvers pulled at his lower lip. “Who’s going to do the advance scouting?” “It sounds like I am,” I cut in. “We want to keep the lead Bug light as possible.” Mikuta nodded. “That’s right. Peter’s Bug is stripped down to the frame and wheels.” McIvers shook his head. “No, I mean the advance work. You need somebody out ahead—four or five miles, at least—to pick up the big flaws and active surface changes, don’t you?” He stared at the Major. “I mean, how can we tell what sort of a hole we may be moving into, unless we have a scout up ahead?” “That’s what we have the charts for,” the Major said sharply. “Charts! I’m talking about detail work. We don’t need to worry about the major topography. It’s the little faults you can’t see on the pictures that can kill us.” He tossed the charts down excitedly. “Look, let me take a Bug out ahead and work reconnaissance, keep five, maybe ten miles ahead of the column. I can stay on good solid ground, of course, but scan the area closely and radio back to Peter where to avoid the flaws. Then—” “No dice,” the Major broke in. “But why not? We could save ourselves days!” “I don’t care what we could save. We stay together. When we get to the Center, I want live men along with me. That means we stay within easy sight of each other at all times. Any climber knows that everybody is safer in a party than one man alone—any time, any place.” McIvers stared at him, his cheeks an angry red. Finally he gave a sullen nod. “Okay. If you say so.” “Well, I say so and I mean it. I don’t want any fancy stuff. We’re going to hit Center together, and finish the Crossing together. Got that?” McIvers nodded. Mikuta then looked at Stone and me and we nodded, too. “All right,” he said slowly. “Now that we’ve got it straight, let’s go.” It was hot. If I forget everything else about that trek, I’ll never forget that huge yellow Sun glaring down, without a break, hotter and hotter with every mile. We knew that the first few days would be the easiest and we were rested and fresh when we started down the long ragged gorge southeast of the Twilight Lab. I moved out first; back over my shoulder, I could see the Major and McIvers crawling out behind me, their pillow tires taking the rugged floor of the gorge smoothly. Behind them, Stone dragged the sledges. Even at only 30 per cent Earth gravity they were a strain on the big tractor, until the ski-blades bit into the fluffy volcanic ash blanketing the valley. We even had a path to follow for the first twenty miles. I kept my eyes pasted to the big polaroid binocs, picking out the track the early research teams had made out into the edge of Brightside. But in a couple of hours we rumbled past Sanderson’s little outpost observatory and the tracks stopped. We were in virgin territory and already the Sun was beginning to bite. We didn’t feel the heat so much those first days out. We saw it. The refrig units kept our skins at a nice comfortable seventy-five degrees Fahrenheit inside our suits, but our eyes watched that glaring Sun and the baked yellow rocks going past, and some nerve pathways got twisted up, somehow. We poured sweat as if we were in a superheated furnace. We drove eight hours and slept five. When a sleep period came due, we pulled the Bugs together into a square, threw up a light aluminum sun-shield and lay out in the dust and rocks. The sun-shield cut the temperature down sixty or seventy degrees, for whatever help that was. And then we ate from the forward sledge—sucking through tubes—protein, carbohydrates, bulk gelatin, vitamins. The Major measured water out with an iron hand, because we’d have drunk ourselves into nephritis in a week otherwise. We were constantly, unceasingly thirsty. Ask the physiologists and psychiatrists why—they can give you have a dozen interesting reasons—but all we knew, or cared about, was that it happened to be so. We didn’t sleep the first few stops, as a consequence. Our eyes burned in spite of the filters and we had roaring headaches, but we couldn’t sleep them off. We sat around looking at each other. Then McIvers would say how good a beer would taste, and off we’d go. We’d have murdered our grandmothers for one ice-cold bottle of beer. After a few driving periods, I began to get my bearings at the wheel. We were moving down into desolation that made Earth’s old Death Valley look like a Japanese rose garden. Huge sun-baked cracks opened up in the floor of the gorge, with black cliffs jutting up on either side; the air was filled with a barely visible yellowish mist of sulfur and sulfurous gases. It was a hot, barren hole, no place for any man to go, but the challenge was so powerful you could almost feel it. No one had ever crossed this land before and escaped. Those who had tried it had been cruelly punished, but the land was still there, so it had to be crossed. Not the easy way. It had to be crossed the hardest way possible: overland, through anything the land could throw up to us, at the most difficult time possible. Yet we knew that even the land might have been conquered before, except for that Sun. We’d fought absolute cold before and won. We’d never fought heat like this and won. The only worse heat in the Solar System was the surface of the Sun itself. Brightside was worth trying for. We would get it or it would get us. That was the bargain. I learned a lot about Mercury those first few driving periods. The gorge petered out after a hundred miles and we moved onto the slope of a range of ragged craters that ran south and east. This range had shown no activity since the first landing on Mercury forty years before, but beyond it there were active cones. Yellow fumes rose from the craters constantly; their sides were shrouded with heavy ash. We couldn’t detect a wind, but we knew there was a hot, sulfurous breeze sweeping in great continental tides across the face of the planet. Not enough for erosion, though. The craters rose up out of jagged gorges, huge towering spears of rock and rubble. Below were the vast yellow flatlands, smoking and hissing from the gases beneath the crust. Over everything was gray dust—silicates and salts, pumice and limestone and granite ash, filling crevices and declivities—offering a soft, treacherous surface for the Bug’s pillow tires. I learned to read the ground, to tell a covered fault by the sag of the dust; I learned to spot a passable crack, and tell it from an impassable cut. Time after time the Bugs ground to a halt while we explored a passage on foot, tied together with light copper cable, digging, advancing, digging some more until we were sure the surface would carry the machines. It was cruel work; we slept in exhaustion. But it went smoothly, at first. Too smoothly, it seemed to me, and the others seemed to think so, too. McIvers’ restlessness was beginning to grate on our nerves. He talked too much, while we were resting or while we were driving; wisecracks, witticisms, unfunny jokes that wore thin with repetition. He took to making side trips from the route now and then, never far, but a little further each time. Jack Stone reacted quite the opposite; he grew quieter with each stop, more reserved and apprehensive. I didn’t like it, but I figured that it would pass off after a while. I was apprehensive enough myself; I just managed to hide it better. And every mile the Sun got bigger and whiter and higher in the sky and hotter. Without our ultra-violet screens and glare filters we would have been blinded; as it was our eyes ached constantly and the skin on our faces itched and tingled at the end of an eight-hour trek. But it took one of those side trips of McIvers’ to deliver the penultimate blow to our already fraying nerves. He had driven down a side-branch of a long canyon running off west of our route and was almost out of sight in a cloud of ash when we heard a sharp cry through our earphones. I wheeled my Bug around with my heart in my throat and spotted him through the binocs, waving frantically from the top of his machine. The Major and I took off, lumbering down the gulch after him as fast as the Bugs could go, with a thousand horrible pictures racing through our minds.... We found him standing stock-still, pointing down the gorge and, for once, he didn’t have anything to say. It was the wreck of a Bug; an old-fashioned half-track model of the sort that hadn’t been in use for years. It was wedged tight in a cut in the rock, an axle broken, its casing split wide open up the middle, half-buried in a rock slide. A dozen feet away were two insulated suits with white bones gleaming through the fiberglass helmets. This was as far as Wyatt and Carpenter had gotten on their Brightside Crossing. On the fifth driving period out, the terrain began to change. It looked the same, but every now and then it felt different. On two occasions I felt my wheels spin, with a howl of protest from my engine. Then, quite suddenly, the Bug gave a lurch; I gunned my motor and nothing happened. I could see the dull gray stuff seeping up around the hubs, thick and tenacious, splattering around in steaming gobs as the wheels spun. I knew what had happened the moment the wheels gave and, a few minutes later, they chained me to the tractor and dragged me back out of the mire. It looked for all the world like thick gray mud, but it was a pit of molten lead, steaming under a soft layer of concealing ash. I picked my way more cautiously then. We were getting into an area of recent surface activity; the surface was really treacherous. I caught myself wishing that the Major had okayed McIvers’ scheme for an advanced scout; more dangerous for the individual, maybe, but I was driving blind now and I didn’t like it. One error in judgment could sink us all, but I wasn’t thinking much about the others. I was worried about me , plenty worried. I kept thinking, better McIvers should go than me. It wasn’t healthy thinking and I knew it, but I couldn’t get the thought out of my mind. It was a grueling eight hours and we slept poorly. Back in the Bug again, we moved still more slowly—edging out on a broad flat plateau, dodging a network of gaping surface cracks—winding back and forth in an effort to keep the machines on solid rock. I couldn’t see far ahead, because of the yellow haze rising from the cracks, so I was almost on top of it when I saw a sharp cut ahead where the surface dropped six feet beyond a deep crack. I let out a shout to halt the others; then I edged my Bug forward, peering at the cleft. It was deep and wide. I moved fifty yards to the left, then back to the right. There was only one place that looked like a possible crossing; a long, narrow ledge of gray stuff that lay down across a section of the fault like a ramp. Even as I watched it, I could feel the surface crust under the Bug trembling and saw the ledge shift over a few feet.

What is the significance of the Brightside Crossing?

10

It is significant to the explorers because it has never been done before, so being the first would presumably make them very famous. On a greater scale, a successful crossing means conquering Mercury for humanity to the Major. He thinks that if he can successfully cross the bright side of Mercury at perihelion (when the planet is closest to the sun) then man has “got Mercury”. As in, if they have the technologies, knowledge, and skills to make the crossing at the hottest possible time there is nothing that isn’t possible for humans to do on the planet.

49165

Brightside Crossing by Alan E. Nourse JAMES BARON was not pleased to hear that he had had a visitor when he reached the Red Lion that evening. He had no stomach for mysteries, vast or trifling, and there were pressing things to think about at this time. Yet the doorman had flagged him as he came in from the street: “A thousand pardons, Mr. Baron. The gentleman—he would leave no name. He said you’d want to see him. He will be back by eight.” Now Baron drummed his fingers on the table top, staring about the quiet lounge. Street trade was discouraged at the Red Lion, gently but persuasively; the patrons were few in number. Across to the right was a group that Baron knew vaguely—Andean climbers, or at least two of them were. Over near the door he recognized old Balmer, who had mapped the first passage to the core of Vulcan Crater on Venus. Baron returned his smile with a nod. Then he settled back and waited impatiently for the intruder who demanded his time without justifying it. Presently a small, grizzled man crossed the room and sat down at Baron’s table. He was short and wiry. His face held no key to his age—he might have been thirty or a thousand—but he looked weary and immensely ugly. His cheeks and forehead were twisted and brown, with scars that were still healing. The stranger said, “I’m glad you waited. I’ve heard you’re planning to attempt the Brightside.” Baron stared at the man for a moment. “I see you can read telecasts,” he said coldly. “The news was correct. We are going to make a Brightside Crossing.” “At perihelion?” “Of course. When else?” The grizzled man searched Baron’s face for a moment without expression. Then he said slowly, “No, I’m afraid you’re not going to make the Crossing.” “Say, who are you, if you don’t mind?” Baron demanded. “The name is Claney,” said the stranger. There was a silence. Then: “Claney? Peter Claney?” “That’s right.” Baron’s eyes were wide with excitement, all trace of anger gone. “Great balls of fire, man— where have you been hiding? We’ve been trying to contact you for months!” “I know. I was hoping you’d quit looking and chuck the whole idea.” “Quit looking!” Baron bent forward over the table. “My friend, we’d given up hope, but we’ve never quit looking. Here, have a drink. There’s so much you can tell us.” His fingers were trembling. Peter Claney shook his head. “I can’t tell you anything you want to hear.” “But you’ve got to. You’re the only man on Earth who’s attempted a Brightside Crossing and lived through it! And the story you cleared for the news—it was nothing. We need details . Where did your equipment fall down? Where did you miscalculate? What were the trouble spots?” Baron jabbed a finger at Claney’s face. “That, for instance—epithelioma? Why? What was wrong with your glass? Your filters? We’ve got to know those things. If you can tell us, we can make it across where your attempt failed—” “You want to know why we failed?” asked Claney. “Of course we want to know. We have to know.” “It’s simple. We failed because it can’t be done. We couldn’t do it and neither can you. No human beings will ever cross the Brightside alive, not if they try for centuries.” “Nonsense,” Baron declared. “We will.” Claney shrugged. “I was there. I know what I’m saying. You can blame the equipment or the men—there were flaws in both quarters—but we just didn’t know what we were fighting. It was the planet that whipped us, that and the Sun . They’ll whip you, too, if you try it.” “Never,” said Baron. “Let me tell you,” Peter Claney said. I’d been interested in the Brightside for almost as long as I can remember (Claney said). I guess I was about ten when Wyatt and Carpenter made the last attempt—that was in 2082, I think. I followed the news stories like a tri-V serial and then I was heartbroken when they just disappeared. I know now that they were a pair of idiots, starting off without proper equipment, with practically no knowledge of surface conditions, without any charts—they couldn’t have made a hundred miles—but I didn’t know that then and it was a terrible tragedy. After that, I followed Sanderson’s work in the Twilight Lab up there and began to get Brightside into my blood, sure as death. But it was Mikuta’s idea to attempt a Crossing. Did you ever know Tom Mikuta? I don’t suppose you did. No, not Japanese—Polish-American. He was a major in the Interplanetary Service for some years and hung onto the title after he gave up his commission. He was with Armstrong on Mars during his Service days, did a good deal of the original mapping and surveying for the Colony there. I first met him on Venus; we spent five years together up there doing some of the nastiest exploring since the Matto Grasso. Then he made the attempt on Vulcan Crater that paved the way for Balmer a few years later. I’d always liked the Major—he was big and quiet and cool, the sort of guy who always had things figured a little further ahead than anyone else and always knew what to do in a tight place. Too many men in this game are all nerve and luck, with no judgment. The Major had both. He also had the kind of personality that could take a crew of wild men and make them work like a well-oiled machine across a thousand miles of Venus jungle. I liked him and I trusted him. He contacted me in New York and he was very casual at first. We spent an evening here at the Red Lion, talking about old times; he told me about the Vulcan business, and how he’d been out to see Sanderson and the Twilight Lab on Mercury, and how he preferred a hot trek to a cold one any day of the year—and then he wanted to know what I’d been doing since Venus and what my plans were. “No particular plans,” I told him. “Why?” He looked me over. “How much do you weigh, Peter?” I told him one-thirty-five. “That much!” he said. “Well, there can’t be much fat on you, at any rate. How do you take heat?” “You should know,” I said. “Venus was no icebox.” “No, I mean real heat.” Then I began to get it. “You’re planning a trip.” “That’s right. A hot trip.” He grinned at me. “Might be dangerous, too.” “What trip?” “Brightside of Mercury,” the Major said. I whistled cautiously. “At aphelion?” He threw his head back. “Why try a Crossing at aphelion? What have you done then? Four thousand miles of butcherous heat, just to have some joker come along, use your data and drum you out of the glory by crossing at perihelion forty-four days later? No, thanks. I want the Brightside without any nonsense about it.” He leaned across me eagerly. “I want to make a Crossing at perihelion and I want to cross on the surface. If a man can do that, he’s got Mercury. Until then, nobody’s got Mercury. I want Mercury—but I’ll need help getting it.” I’d thought of it a thousand times and never dared consider it. Nobody had, since Wyatt and Carpenter disappeared. Mercury turns on its axis in the same time that it wheels around the Sun, which means that the Brightside is always facing in. That makes the Brightside of Mercury at perihelion the hottest place in the Solar System, with one single exception: the surface of the Sun itself. It would be a hellish trek. Only a few men had ever learned just how hellish and they never came back to tell about it. It was a real hell’s Crossing, but someday, I thought, somebody would cross it. I wanted to be along. The Twilight Lab, near the northern pole of Mercury, was the obvious jumping-off place. The setup there wasn’t very extensive—a rocket landing, the labs and quarters for Sanderson’s crew sunk deep into the crust, and the tower that housed the Solar ’scope that Sanderson had built up there ten years before. Twilight Lab wasn’t particularly interested in the Brightside, of course—the Sun was Sanderson’s baby and he’d picked Mercury as the closest chunk of rock to the Sun that could hold his observatory. He’d chosen a good location, too. On Mercury, the Brightside temperature hits 770° F. at perihelion and the Darkside runs pretty constant at -410° F. No permanent installation with a human crew could survive at either extreme. But with Mercury’s wobble, the twilight zone between Brightside and Darkside offers something closer to survival temperatures. Sanderson built the Lab up near the pole, where the zone is about five miles wide, so the temperature only varies 50 to 60 degrees with the libration. The Solar ’scope could take that much change and they’d get good clear observation of the Sun for about seventy out of the eighty-eight days it takes the planet to wheel around. The Major was counting on Sanderson knowing something about Mercury as well as the Sun when we camped at the Lab to make final preparations. Sanderson did. He thought we’d lost our minds and he said so, but he gave us all the help he could. He spent a week briefing Jack Stone, the third member of our party, who had arrived with the supplies and equipment a few days earlier. Poor Jack met us at the rocket landing almost bawling, Sanderson had given him such a gloomy picture of what Brightside was like. Stone was a youngster—hardly twenty-five, I’d say—but he’d been with the Major at Vulcan and had begged to join this trek. I had a funny feeling that Jack really didn’t care for exploring too much, but he thought Mikuta was God, followed him around like a puppy. It didn’t matter to me as long as he knew what he was getting in for. You don’t go asking people in this game why they do it—they’re liable to get awfully uneasy and none of them can ever give you an answer that makes sense. Anyway, Stone had borrowed three men from the Lab, and had the supplies and equipment all lined up when we got there, ready to check and test. We dug right in. With plenty of funds—tri-V money and some government cash the Major had talked his way around—our equipment was new and good. Mikuta had done the designing and testing himself, with a big assist from Sanderson. We had four Bugs, three of them the light pillow-tire models, with special lead-cooled cut-in engines when the heat set in, and one heavy-duty tractor model for pulling the sledges. The Major went over them like a kid at the circus. Then he said, “Have you heard anything from McIvers?” “Who’s he?” Stone wanted to know. “He’ll be joining us. He’s a good man—got quite a name for climbing, back home.” The Major turned to me. “You’ve probably heard of him.” I’d heard plenty of stories about Ted McIvers and I wasn’t too happy to hear that he was joining us. “Kind of a daredevil, isn’t he?” “Maybe. He’s lucky and skillful. Where do you draw the line? We’ll need plenty of both.” “Have you ever worked with him?” I asked. “No. Are you worried?” “Not exactly. But Brightside is no place to count on luck.” The Major laughed. “I don’t think we need to worry about McIvers. We understood each other when I talked up the trip to him and we’re going to need each other too much to do any fooling around.” He turned back to the supply list. “Meanwhile, let’s get this stuff listed and packed. We’ll need to cut weight sharply and our time is short. Sanderson says we should leave in three days.” Two days later, McIvers hadn’t arrived. The Major didn’t say much about it. Stone was getting edgy and so was I. We spent the second day studying charts of the Brightside, such as they were. The best available were pretty poor, taken from so far out that the detail dissolved into blurs on blow-up. They showed the biggest ranges of peaks and craters and faults, and that was all. Still, we could use them to plan a broad outline of our course. “This range here,” the Major said as we crowded around the board, “is largely inactive, according to Sanderson. But these to the south and west could be active. Seismograph tracings suggest a lot of activity in that region, getting worse down toward the equator—not only volcanic, but sub-surface shifting.” Stone nodded. “Sanderson told me there was probably constant surface activity.” The Major shrugged. “Well, it’s treacherous, there’s no doubt of it. But the only way to avoid it is to travel over the Pole, which would lose us days and offer us no guarantee of less activity to the west. Now we might avoid some if we could find a pass through this range and cut sharp east—” It seemed that the more we considered the problem, the further we got from a solution. We knew there were active volcanoes on the Brightside—even on the Darkside, though surface activity there was pretty much slowed down and localized. But there were problems of atmosphere on Brightside, as well. There was an atmosphere and a constant atmospheric flow from Brightside to Darkside. Not much—the lighter gases had reached escape velocity and disappeared from Brightside millennia ago—but there was CO 2 , and nitrogen, and traces of other heavier gases. There was also an abundance of sulfur vapor, as well as carbon disulfide and sulfur dioxide. The atmospheric tide moved toward the Darkside, where it condensed, carrying enough volcanic ash with it for Sanderson to estimate the depth and nature of the surface upheavals on Brightside from his samplings. The trick was to find a passage that avoided those upheavals as far as possible. But in the final analysis, we were barely scraping the surface. The only way we would find out what was happening where was to be there. Finally, on the third day, McIvers blew in on a freight rocket from Venus. He’d missed the ship that the Major and I had taken by a few hours, and had conned his way to Venus in hopes of getting a hop from there. He didn’t seem too upset about it, as though this were his usual way of doing things and he couldn’t see why everyone should get so excited. He was a tall, rangy man with long, wavy hair prematurely gray, and the sort of eyes that looked like a climber’s—half-closed, sleepy, almost indolent, but capable of abrupt alertness. And he never stood still; he was always moving, always doing something with his hands, or talking, or pacing about. Evidently the Major decided not to press the issue of his arrival. There was still work to do, and an hour later we were running the final tests on the pressure suits. That evening, Stone and McIvers were thick as thieves, and everything was set for an early departure after we got some rest. “And that,” said Baron, finishing his drink and signaling the waiter for another pair, “was your first big mistake.” Peter Claney raised his eyebrows. “McIvers?” “Of course.” Claney shrugged, glanced at the small quiet tables around them. “There are lots of bizarre personalities around a place like this, and some of the best wouldn’t seem to be the most reliable at first glance. Anyway, personality problems weren’t our big problem right then. Equipment worried us first and route next.” Baron nodded in agreement. “What kind of suits did you have?” “The best insulating suits ever made,” said Claney. “Each one had an inner lining of a fiberglass modification, to avoid the clumsiness of asbestos, and carried the refrigerating unit and oxygen storage which we recharged from the sledges every eight hours. Outer layer carried a monomolecular chrome reflecting surface that made us glitter like Christmas trees. And we had a half-inch dead-air space under positive pressure between the two layers. Warning thermocouples, of course—at 770 degrees, it wouldn’t take much time to fry us to cinders if the suits failed somewhere.” “How about the Bugs?” “They were insulated, too, but we weren’t counting on them too much for protection.” “You weren’t!” Baron exclaimed. “Why not?” “We’d be in and out of them too much. They gave us mobility and storage, but we knew we’d have to do a lot of forward work on foot.” Claney smiled bitterly. “Which meant that we had an inch of fiberglass and a half-inch of dead air between us and a surface temperature where lead flowed like water and zinc was almost at melting point and the pools of sulfur in the shadows were boiling like oatmeal over a campfire.” Baron licked his lips. His fingers stroked the cool, wet glass as he set it down on the tablecloth. “Go on,” he said tautly. “You started on schedule?” “Oh, yes,” said Claney, “we started on schedule, all right. We just didn’t quite end on schedule, that was all. But I’m getting to that.” He settled back in his chair and continued. We jumped off from Twilight on a course due southeast with thirty days to make it to the Center of Brightside. If we could cross an average of seventy miles a day, we could hit Center exactly at perihelion, the point of Mercury’s closest approach to the Sun—which made Center the hottest part of the planet at the hottest it ever gets. The Sun was already huge and yellow over the horizon when we started, twice the size it appears on Earth. Every day that Sun would grow bigger and whiter, and every day the surface would get hotter. But once we reached Center, the job was only half done—we would still have to travel another two thousand miles to the opposite twilight zone. Sanderson was to meet us on the other side in the Laboratory’s scout ship, approximately sixty days from the time we jumped off. That was the plan, in outline. It was up to us to cross those seventy miles a day, no matter how hot it became, no matter what terrain we had to cross. Detours would be dangerous and time-consuming. Delays could cost us our lives. We all knew that. The Major briefed us on details an hour before we left. “Peter, you’ll take the lead Bug, the small one we stripped down for you. Stone and I will flank you on either side, giving you a hundred-yard lead. McIvers, you’ll have the job of dragging the sledges, so we’ll have to direct your course pretty closely. Peter’s job is to pick the passage at any given point. If there’s any doubt of safe passage, we’ll all explore ahead on foot before we risk the Bugs. Got that?” McIvers and Stone exchanged glances. McIvers said: “Jack and I were planning to change around. We figured he could take the sledges. That would give me a little more mobility.” The Major looked up sharply at Stone. “Do you buy that, Jack?” Stone shrugged. “I don’t mind. Mac wanted—” McIvers made an impatient gesture with his hands. “It doesn’t matter. I just feel better when I’m on the move. Does it make any difference?” “I guess it doesn’t,” said the Major. “Then you’ll flank Peter along with me. Right?” “Sure, sure.” McIvers pulled at his lower lip. “Who’s going to do the advance scouting?” “It sounds like I am,” I cut in. “We want to keep the lead Bug light as possible.” Mikuta nodded. “That’s right. Peter’s Bug is stripped down to the frame and wheels.” McIvers shook his head. “No, I mean the advance work. You need somebody out ahead—four or five miles, at least—to pick up the big flaws and active surface changes, don’t you?” He stared at the Major. “I mean, how can we tell what sort of a hole we may be moving into, unless we have a scout up ahead?” “That’s what we have the charts for,” the Major said sharply. “Charts! I’m talking about detail work. We don’t need to worry about the major topography. It’s the little faults you can’t see on the pictures that can kill us.” He tossed the charts down excitedly. “Look, let me take a Bug out ahead and work reconnaissance, keep five, maybe ten miles ahead of the column. I can stay on good solid ground, of course, but scan the area closely and radio back to Peter where to avoid the flaws. Then—” “No dice,” the Major broke in. “But why not? We could save ourselves days!” “I don’t care what we could save. We stay together. When we get to the Center, I want live men along with me. That means we stay within easy sight of each other at all times. Any climber knows that everybody is safer in a party than one man alone—any time, any place.” McIvers stared at him, his cheeks an angry red. Finally he gave a sullen nod. “Okay. If you say so.” “Well, I say so and I mean it. I don’t want any fancy stuff. We’re going to hit Center together, and finish the Crossing together. Got that?” McIvers nodded. Mikuta then looked at Stone and me and we nodded, too. “All right,” he said slowly. “Now that we’ve got it straight, let’s go.” It was hot. If I forget everything else about that trek, I’ll never forget that huge yellow Sun glaring down, without a break, hotter and hotter with every mile. We knew that the first few days would be the easiest and we were rested and fresh when we started down the long ragged gorge southeast of the Twilight Lab. I moved out first; back over my shoulder, I could see the Major and McIvers crawling out behind me, their pillow tires taking the rugged floor of the gorge smoothly. Behind them, Stone dragged the sledges. Even at only 30 per cent Earth gravity they were a strain on the big tractor, until the ski-blades bit into the fluffy volcanic ash blanketing the valley. We even had a path to follow for the first twenty miles. I kept my eyes pasted to the big polaroid binocs, picking out the track the early research teams had made out into the edge of Brightside. But in a couple of hours we rumbled past Sanderson’s little outpost observatory and the tracks stopped. We were in virgin territory and already the Sun was beginning to bite. We didn’t feel the heat so much those first days out. We saw it. The refrig units kept our skins at a nice comfortable seventy-five degrees Fahrenheit inside our suits, but our eyes watched that glaring Sun and the baked yellow rocks going past, and some nerve pathways got twisted up, somehow. We poured sweat as if we were in a superheated furnace. We drove eight hours and slept five. When a sleep period came due, we pulled the Bugs together into a square, threw up a light aluminum sun-shield and lay out in the dust and rocks. The sun-shield cut the temperature down sixty or seventy degrees, for whatever help that was. And then we ate from the forward sledge—sucking through tubes—protein, carbohydrates, bulk gelatin, vitamins. The Major measured water out with an iron hand, because we’d have drunk ourselves into nephritis in a week otherwise. We were constantly, unceasingly thirsty. Ask the physiologists and psychiatrists why—they can give you have a dozen interesting reasons—but all we knew, or cared about, was that it happened to be so. We didn’t sleep the first few stops, as a consequence. Our eyes burned in spite of the filters and we had roaring headaches, but we couldn’t sleep them off. We sat around looking at each other. Then McIvers would say how good a beer would taste, and off we’d go. We’d have murdered our grandmothers for one ice-cold bottle of beer. After a few driving periods, I began to get my bearings at the wheel. We were moving down into desolation that made Earth’s old Death Valley look like a Japanese rose garden. Huge sun-baked cracks opened up in the floor of the gorge, with black cliffs jutting up on either side; the air was filled with a barely visible yellowish mist of sulfur and sulfurous gases. It was a hot, barren hole, no place for any man to go, but the challenge was so powerful you could almost feel it. No one had ever crossed this land before and escaped. Those who had tried it had been cruelly punished, but the land was still there, so it had to be crossed. Not the easy way. It had to be crossed the hardest way possible: overland, through anything the land could throw up to us, at the most difficult time possible. Yet we knew that even the land might have been conquered before, except for that Sun. We’d fought absolute cold before and won. We’d never fought heat like this and won. The only worse heat in the Solar System was the surface of the Sun itself. Brightside was worth trying for. We would get it or it would get us. That was the bargain. I learned a lot about Mercury those first few driving periods. The gorge petered out after a hundred miles and we moved onto the slope of a range of ragged craters that ran south and east. This range had shown no activity since the first landing on Mercury forty years before, but beyond it there were active cones. Yellow fumes rose from the craters constantly; their sides were shrouded with heavy ash. We couldn’t detect a wind, but we knew there was a hot, sulfurous breeze sweeping in great continental tides across the face of the planet. Not enough for erosion, though. The craters rose up out of jagged gorges, huge towering spears of rock and rubble. Below were the vast yellow flatlands, smoking and hissing from the gases beneath the crust. Over everything was gray dust—silicates and salts, pumice and limestone and granite ash, filling crevices and declivities—offering a soft, treacherous surface for the Bug’s pillow tires. I learned to read the ground, to tell a covered fault by the sag of the dust; I learned to spot a passable crack, and tell it from an impassable cut. Time after time the Bugs ground to a halt while we explored a passage on foot, tied together with light copper cable, digging, advancing, digging some more until we were sure the surface would carry the machines. It was cruel work; we slept in exhaustion. But it went smoothly, at first. Too smoothly, it seemed to me, and the others seemed to think so, too. McIvers’ restlessness was beginning to grate on our nerves. He talked too much, while we were resting or while we were driving; wisecracks, witticisms, unfunny jokes that wore thin with repetition. He took to making side trips from the route now and then, never far, but a little further each time. Jack Stone reacted quite the opposite; he grew quieter with each stop, more reserved and apprehensive. I didn’t like it, but I figured that it would pass off after a while. I was apprehensive enough myself; I just managed to hide it better. And every mile the Sun got bigger and whiter and higher in the sky and hotter. Without our ultra-violet screens and glare filters we would have been blinded; as it was our eyes ached constantly and the skin on our faces itched and tingled at the end of an eight-hour trek. But it took one of those side trips of McIvers’ to deliver the penultimate blow to our already fraying nerves. He had driven down a side-branch of a long canyon running off west of our route and was almost out of sight in a cloud of ash when we heard a sharp cry through our earphones. I wheeled my Bug around with my heart in my throat and spotted him through the binocs, waving frantically from the top of his machine. The Major and I took off, lumbering down the gulch after him as fast as the Bugs could go, with a thousand horrible pictures racing through our minds.... We found him standing stock-still, pointing down the gorge and, for once, he didn’t have anything to say. It was the wreck of a Bug; an old-fashioned half-track model of the sort that hadn’t been in use for years. It was wedged tight in a cut in the rock, an axle broken, its casing split wide open up the middle, half-buried in a rock slide. A dozen feet away were two insulated suits with white bones gleaming through the fiberglass helmets. This was as far as Wyatt and Carpenter had gotten on their Brightside Crossing. On the fifth driving period out, the terrain began to change. It looked the same, but every now and then it felt different. On two occasions I felt my wheels spin, with a howl of protest from my engine. Then, quite suddenly, the Bug gave a lurch; I gunned my motor and nothing happened. I could see the dull gray stuff seeping up around the hubs, thick and tenacious, splattering around in steaming gobs as the wheels spun. I knew what had happened the moment the wheels gave and, a few minutes later, they chained me to the tractor and dragged me back out of the mire. It looked for all the world like thick gray mud, but it was a pit of molten lead, steaming under a soft layer of concealing ash. I picked my way more cautiously then. We were getting into an area of recent surface activity; the surface was really treacherous. I caught myself wishing that the Major had okayed McIvers’ scheme for an advanced scout; more dangerous for the individual, maybe, but I was driving blind now and I didn’t like it. One error in judgment could sink us all, but I wasn’t thinking much about the others. I was worried about me , plenty worried. I kept thinking, better McIvers should go than me. It wasn’t healthy thinking and I knew it, but I couldn’t get the thought out of my mind. It was a grueling eight hours and we slept poorly. Back in the Bug again, we moved still more slowly—edging out on a broad flat plateau, dodging a network of gaping surface cracks—winding back and forth in an effort to keep the machines on solid rock. I couldn’t see far ahead, because of the yellow haze rising from the cracks, so I was almost on top of it when I saw a sharp cut ahead where the surface dropped six feet beyond a deep crack. I let out a shout to halt the others; then I edged my Bug forward, peering at the cleft. It was deep and wide. I moved fifty yards to the left, then back to the right. There was only one place that looked like a possible crossing; a long, narrow ledge of gray stuff that lay down across a section of the fault like a ramp. Even as I watched it, I could feel the surface crust under the Bug trembling and saw the ledge shift over a few feet.

What is the significance of the Brightside Crossing?

9

The Brightside Crossing is significant because no one has done it successfully, though it has been attempted before. It is also significant because the entire story is about the Brightside Crossing. Baron’s well-publicized upcoming mission to cross it is what brings Claney to speak with him (and try to talk him out of it), and the story Claney tells is about his own experience attempting to cross, as he is the only man on Earth to have survived an attempt (though he did sustain some physical damage). The Brightside gets its name from one of the most dangerous things about it: its proximity to the sun.

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Brightside Crossing by Alan E. Nourse JAMES BARON was not pleased to hear that he had had a visitor when he reached the Red Lion that evening. He had no stomach for mysteries, vast or trifling, and there were pressing things to think about at this time. Yet the doorman had flagged him as he came in from the street: “A thousand pardons, Mr. Baron. The gentleman—he would leave no name. He said you’d want to see him. He will be back by eight.” Now Baron drummed his fingers on the table top, staring about the quiet lounge. Street trade was discouraged at the Red Lion, gently but persuasively; the patrons were few in number. Across to the right was a group that Baron knew vaguely—Andean climbers, or at least two of them were. Over near the door he recognized old Balmer, who had mapped the first passage to the core of Vulcan Crater on Venus. Baron returned his smile with a nod. Then he settled back and waited impatiently for the intruder who demanded his time without justifying it. Presently a small, grizzled man crossed the room and sat down at Baron’s table. He was short and wiry. His face held no key to his age—he might have been thirty or a thousand—but he looked weary and immensely ugly. His cheeks and forehead were twisted and brown, with scars that were still healing. The stranger said, “I’m glad you waited. I’ve heard you’re planning to attempt the Brightside.” Baron stared at the man for a moment. “I see you can read telecasts,” he said coldly. “The news was correct. We are going to make a Brightside Crossing.” “At perihelion?” “Of course. When else?” The grizzled man searched Baron’s face for a moment without expression. Then he said slowly, “No, I’m afraid you’re not going to make the Crossing.” “Say, who are you, if you don’t mind?” Baron demanded. “The name is Claney,” said the stranger. There was a silence. Then: “Claney? Peter Claney?” “That’s right.” Baron’s eyes were wide with excitement, all trace of anger gone. “Great balls of fire, man— where have you been hiding? We’ve been trying to contact you for months!” “I know. I was hoping you’d quit looking and chuck the whole idea.” “Quit looking!” Baron bent forward over the table. “My friend, we’d given up hope, but we’ve never quit looking. Here, have a drink. There’s so much you can tell us.” His fingers were trembling. Peter Claney shook his head. “I can’t tell you anything you want to hear.” “But you’ve got to. You’re the only man on Earth who’s attempted a Brightside Crossing and lived through it! And the story you cleared for the news—it was nothing. We need details . Where did your equipment fall down? Where did you miscalculate? What were the trouble spots?” Baron jabbed a finger at Claney’s face. “That, for instance—epithelioma? Why? What was wrong with your glass? Your filters? We’ve got to know those things. If you can tell us, we can make it across where your attempt failed—” “You want to know why we failed?” asked Claney. “Of course we want to know. We have to know.” “It’s simple. We failed because it can’t be done. We couldn’t do it and neither can you. No human beings will ever cross the Brightside alive, not if they try for centuries.” “Nonsense,” Baron declared. “We will.” Claney shrugged. “I was there. I know what I’m saying. You can blame the equipment or the men—there were flaws in both quarters—but we just didn’t know what we were fighting. It was the planet that whipped us, that and the Sun . They’ll whip you, too, if you try it.” “Never,” said Baron. “Let me tell you,” Peter Claney said. I’d been interested in the Brightside for almost as long as I can remember (Claney said). I guess I was about ten when Wyatt and Carpenter made the last attempt—that was in 2082, I think. I followed the news stories like a tri-V serial and then I was heartbroken when they just disappeared. I know now that they were a pair of idiots, starting off without proper equipment, with practically no knowledge of surface conditions, without any charts—they couldn’t have made a hundred miles—but I didn’t know that then and it was a terrible tragedy. After that, I followed Sanderson’s work in the Twilight Lab up there and began to get Brightside into my blood, sure as death. But it was Mikuta’s idea to attempt a Crossing. Did you ever know Tom Mikuta? I don’t suppose you did. No, not Japanese—Polish-American. He was a major in the Interplanetary Service for some years and hung onto the title after he gave up his commission. He was with Armstrong on Mars during his Service days, did a good deal of the original mapping and surveying for the Colony there. I first met him on Venus; we spent five years together up there doing some of the nastiest exploring since the Matto Grasso. Then he made the attempt on Vulcan Crater that paved the way for Balmer a few years later. I’d always liked the Major—he was big and quiet and cool, the sort of guy who always had things figured a little further ahead than anyone else and always knew what to do in a tight place. Too many men in this game are all nerve and luck, with no judgment. The Major had both. He also had the kind of personality that could take a crew of wild men and make them work like a well-oiled machine across a thousand miles of Venus jungle. I liked him and I trusted him. He contacted me in New York and he was very casual at first. We spent an evening here at the Red Lion, talking about old times; he told me about the Vulcan business, and how he’d been out to see Sanderson and the Twilight Lab on Mercury, and how he preferred a hot trek to a cold one any day of the year—and then he wanted to know what I’d been doing since Venus and what my plans were. “No particular plans,” I told him. “Why?” He looked me over. “How much do you weigh, Peter?” I told him one-thirty-five. “That much!” he said. “Well, there can’t be much fat on you, at any rate. How do you take heat?” “You should know,” I said. “Venus was no icebox.” “No, I mean real heat.” Then I began to get it. “You’re planning a trip.” “That’s right. A hot trip.” He grinned at me. “Might be dangerous, too.” “What trip?” “Brightside of Mercury,” the Major said. I whistled cautiously. “At aphelion?” He threw his head back. “Why try a Crossing at aphelion? What have you done then? Four thousand miles of butcherous heat, just to have some joker come along, use your data and drum you out of the glory by crossing at perihelion forty-four days later? No, thanks. I want the Brightside without any nonsense about it.” He leaned across me eagerly. “I want to make a Crossing at perihelion and I want to cross on the surface. If a man can do that, he’s got Mercury. Until then, nobody’s got Mercury. I want Mercury—but I’ll need help getting it.” I’d thought of it a thousand times and never dared consider it. Nobody had, since Wyatt and Carpenter disappeared. Mercury turns on its axis in the same time that it wheels around the Sun, which means that the Brightside is always facing in. That makes the Brightside of Mercury at perihelion the hottest place in the Solar System, with one single exception: the surface of the Sun itself. It would be a hellish trek. Only a few men had ever learned just how hellish and they never came back to tell about it. It was a real hell’s Crossing, but someday, I thought, somebody would cross it. I wanted to be along. The Twilight Lab, near the northern pole of Mercury, was the obvious jumping-off place. The setup there wasn’t very extensive—a rocket landing, the labs and quarters for Sanderson’s crew sunk deep into the crust, and the tower that housed the Solar ’scope that Sanderson had built up there ten years before. Twilight Lab wasn’t particularly interested in the Brightside, of course—the Sun was Sanderson’s baby and he’d picked Mercury as the closest chunk of rock to the Sun that could hold his observatory. He’d chosen a good location, too. On Mercury, the Brightside temperature hits 770° F. at perihelion and the Darkside runs pretty constant at -410° F. No permanent installation with a human crew could survive at either extreme. But with Mercury’s wobble, the twilight zone between Brightside and Darkside offers something closer to survival temperatures. Sanderson built the Lab up near the pole, where the zone is about five miles wide, so the temperature only varies 50 to 60 degrees with the libration. The Solar ’scope could take that much change and they’d get good clear observation of the Sun for about seventy out of the eighty-eight days it takes the planet to wheel around. The Major was counting on Sanderson knowing something about Mercury as well as the Sun when we camped at the Lab to make final preparations. Sanderson did. He thought we’d lost our minds and he said so, but he gave us all the help he could. He spent a week briefing Jack Stone, the third member of our party, who had arrived with the supplies and equipment a few days earlier. Poor Jack met us at the rocket landing almost bawling, Sanderson had given him such a gloomy picture of what Brightside was like. Stone was a youngster—hardly twenty-five, I’d say—but he’d been with the Major at Vulcan and had begged to join this trek. I had a funny feeling that Jack really didn’t care for exploring too much, but he thought Mikuta was God, followed him around like a puppy. It didn’t matter to me as long as he knew what he was getting in for. You don’t go asking people in this game why they do it—they’re liable to get awfully uneasy and none of them can ever give you an answer that makes sense. Anyway, Stone had borrowed three men from the Lab, and had the supplies and equipment all lined up when we got there, ready to check and test. We dug right in. With plenty of funds—tri-V money and some government cash the Major had talked his way around—our equipment was new and good. Mikuta had done the designing and testing himself, with a big assist from Sanderson. We had four Bugs, three of them the light pillow-tire models, with special lead-cooled cut-in engines when the heat set in, and one heavy-duty tractor model for pulling the sledges. The Major went over them like a kid at the circus. Then he said, “Have you heard anything from McIvers?” “Who’s he?” Stone wanted to know. “He’ll be joining us. He’s a good man—got quite a name for climbing, back home.” The Major turned to me. “You’ve probably heard of him.” I’d heard plenty of stories about Ted McIvers and I wasn’t too happy to hear that he was joining us. “Kind of a daredevil, isn’t he?” “Maybe. He’s lucky and skillful. Where do you draw the line? We’ll need plenty of both.” “Have you ever worked with him?” I asked. “No. Are you worried?” “Not exactly. But Brightside is no place to count on luck.” The Major laughed. “I don’t think we need to worry about McIvers. We understood each other when I talked up the trip to him and we’re going to need each other too much to do any fooling around.” He turned back to the supply list. “Meanwhile, let’s get this stuff listed and packed. We’ll need to cut weight sharply and our time is short. Sanderson says we should leave in three days.” Two days later, McIvers hadn’t arrived. The Major didn’t say much about it. Stone was getting edgy and so was I. We spent the second day studying charts of the Brightside, such as they were. The best available were pretty poor, taken from so far out that the detail dissolved into blurs on blow-up. They showed the biggest ranges of peaks and craters and faults, and that was all. Still, we could use them to plan a broad outline of our course. “This range here,” the Major said as we crowded around the board, “is largely inactive, according to Sanderson. But these to the south and west could be active. Seismograph tracings suggest a lot of activity in that region, getting worse down toward the equator—not only volcanic, but sub-surface shifting.” Stone nodded. “Sanderson told me there was probably constant surface activity.” The Major shrugged. “Well, it’s treacherous, there’s no doubt of it. But the only way to avoid it is to travel over the Pole, which would lose us days and offer us no guarantee of less activity to the west. Now we might avoid some if we could find a pass through this range and cut sharp east—” It seemed that the more we considered the problem, the further we got from a solution. We knew there were active volcanoes on the Brightside—even on the Darkside, though surface activity there was pretty much slowed down and localized. But there were problems of atmosphere on Brightside, as well. There was an atmosphere and a constant atmospheric flow from Brightside to Darkside. Not much—the lighter gases had reached escape velocity and disappeared from Brightside millennia ago—but there was CO 2 , and nitrogen, and traces of other heavier gases. There was also an abundance of sulfur vapor, as well as carbon disulfide and sulfur dioxide. The atmospheric tide moved toward the Darkside, where it condensed, carrying enough volcanic ash with it for Sanderson to estimate the depth and nature of the surface upheavals on Brightside from his samplings. The trick was to find a passage that avoided those upheavals as far as possible. But in the final analysis, we were barely scraping the surface. The only way we would find out what was happening where was to be there. Finally, on the third day, McIvers blew in on a freight rocket from Venus. He’d missed the ship that the Major and I had taken by a few hours, and had conned his way to Venus in hopes of getting a hop from there. He didn’t seem too upset about it, as though this were his usual way of doing things and he couldn’t see why everyone should get so excited. He was a tall, rangy man with long, wavy hair prematurely gray, and the sort of eyes that looked like a climber’s—half-closed, sleepy, almost indolent, but capable of abrupt alertness. And he never stood still; he was always moving, always doing something with his hands, or talking, or pacing about. Evidently the Major decided not to press the issue of his arrival. There was still work to do, and an hour later we were running the final tests on the pressure suits. That evening, Stone and McIvers were thick as thieves, and everything was set for an early departure after we got some rest. “And that,” said Baron, finishing his drink and signaling the waiter for another pair, “was your first big mistake.” Peter Claney raised his eyebrows. “McIvers?” “Of course.” Claney shrugged, glanced at the small quiet tables around them. “There are lots of bizarre personalities around a place like this, and some of the best wouldn’t seem to be the most reliable at first glance. Anyway, personality problems weren’t our big problem right then. Equipment worried us first and route next.” Baron nodded in agreement. “What kind of suits did you have?” “The best insulating suits ever made,” said Claney. “Each one had an inner lining of a fiberglass modification, to avoid the clumsiness of asbestos, and carried the refrigerating unit and oxygen storage which we recharged from the sledges every eight hours. Outer layer carried a monomolecular chrome reflecting surface that made us glitter like Christmas trees. And we had a half-inch dead-air space under positive pressure between the two layers. Warning thermocouples, of course—at 770 degrees, it wouldn’t take much time to fry us to cinders if the suits failed somewhere.” “How about the Bugs?” “They were insulated, too, but we weren’t counting on them too much for protection.” “You weren’t!” Baron exclaimed. “Why not?” “We’d be in and out of them too much. They gave us mobility and storage, but we knew we’d have to do a lot of forward work on foot.” Claney smiled bitterly. “Which meant that we had an inch of fiberglass and a half-inch of dead air between us and a surface temperature where lead flowed like water and zinc was almost at melting point and the pools of sulfur in the shadows were boiling like oatmeal over a campfire.” Baron licked his lips. His fingers stroked the cool, wet glass as he set it down on the tablecloth. “Go on,” he said tautly. “You started on schedule?” “Oh, yes,” said Claney, “we started on schedule, all right. We just didn’t quite end on schedule, that was all. But I’m getting to that.” He settled back in his chair and continued. We jumped off from Twilight on a course due southeast with thirty days to make it to the Center of Brightside. If we could cross an average of seventy miles a day, we could hit Center exactly at perihelion, the point of Mercury’s closest approach to the Sun—which made Center the hottest part of the planet at the hottest it ever gets. The Sun was already huge and yellow over the horizon when we started, twice the size it appears on Earth. Every day that Sun would grow bigger and whiter, and every day the surface would get hotter. But once we reached Center, the job was only half done—we would still have to travel another two thousand miles to the opposite twilight zone. Sanderson was to meet us on the other side in the Laboratory’s scout ship, approximately sixty days from the time we jumped off. That was the plan, in outline. It was up to us to cross those seventy miles a day, no matter how hot it became, no matter what terrain we had to cross. Detours would be dangerous and time-consuming. Delays could cost us our lives. We all knew that. The Major briefed us on details an hour before we left. “Peter, you’ll take the lead Bug, the small one we stripped down for you. Stone and I will flank you on either side, giving you a hundred-yard lead. McIvers, you’ll have the job of dragging the sledges, so we’ll have to direct your course pretty closely. Peter’s job is to pick the passage at any given point. If there’s any doubt of safe passage, we’ll all explore ahead on foot before we risk the Bugs. Got that?” McIvers and Stone exchanged glances. McIvers said: “Jack and I were planning to change around. We figured he could take the sledges. That would give me a little more mobility.” The Major looked up sharply at Stone. “Do you buy that, Jack?” Stone shrugged. “I don’t mind. Mac wanted—” McIvers made an impatient gesture with his hands. “It doesn’t matter. I just feel better when I’m on the move. Does it make any difference?” “I guess it doesn’t,” said the Major. “Then you’ll flank Peter along with me. Right?” “Sure, sure.” McIvers pulled at his lower lip. “Who’s going to do the advance scouting?” “It sounds like I am,” I cut in. “We want to keep the lead Bug light as possible.” Mikuta nodded. “That’s right. Peter’s Bug is stripped down to the frame and wheels.” McIvers shook his head. “No, I mean the advance work. You need somebody out ahead—four or five miles, at least—to pick up the big flaws and active surface changes, don’t you?” He stared at the Major. “I mean, how can we tell what sort of a hole we may be moving into, unless we have a scout up ahead?” “That’s what we have the charts for,” the Major said sharply. “Charts! I’m talking about detail work. We don’t need to worry about the major topography. It’s the little faults you can’t see on the pictures that can kill us.” He tossed the charts down excitedly. “Look, let me take a Bug out ahead and work reconnaissance, keep five, maybe ten miles ahead of the column. I can stay on good solid ground, of course, but scan the area closely and radio back to Peter where to avoid the flaws. Then—” “No dice,” the Major broke in. “But why not? We could save ourselves days!” “I don’t care what we could save. We stay together. When we get to the Center, I want live men along with me. That means we stay within easy sight of each other at all times. Any climber knows that everybody is safer in a party than one man alone—any time, any place.” McIvers stared at him, his cheeks an angry red. Finally he gave a sullen nod. “Okay. If you say so.” “Well, I say so and I mean it. I don’t want any fancy stuff. We’re going to hit Center together, and finish the Crossing together. Got that?” McIvers nodded. Mikuta then looked at Stone and me and we nodded, too. “All right,” he said slowly. “Now that we’ve got it straight, let’s go.” It was hot. If I forget everything else about that trek, I’ll never forget that huge yellow Sun glaring down, without a break, hotter and hotter with every mile. We knew that the first few days would be the easiest and we were rested and fresh when we started down the long ragged gorge southeast of the Twilight Lab. I moved out first; back over my shoulder, I could see the Major and McIvers crawling out behind me, their pillow tires taking the rugged floor of the gorge smoothly. Behind them, Stone dragged the sledges. Even at only 30 per cent Earth gravity they were a strain on the big tractor, until the ski-blades bit into the fluffy volcanic ash blanketing the valley. We even had a path to follow for the first twenty miles. I kept my eyes pasted to the big polaroid binocs, picking out the track the early research teams had made out into the edge of Brightside. But in a couple of hours we rumbled past Sanderson’s little outpost observatory and the tracks stopped. We were in virgin territory and already the Sun was beginning to bite. We didn’t feel the heat so much those first days out. We saw it. The refrig units kept our skins at a nice comfortable seventy-five degrees Fahrenheit inside our suits, but our eyes watched that glaring Sun and the baked yellow rocks going past, and some nerve pathways got twisted up, somehow. We poured sweat as if we were in a superheated furnace. We drove eight hours and slept five. When a sleep period came due, we pulled the Bugs together into a square, threw up a light aluminum sun-shield and lay out in the dust and rocks. The sun-shield cut the temperature down sixty or seventy degrees, for whatever help that was. And then we ate from the forward sledge—sucking through tubes—protein, carbohydrates, bulk gelatin, vitamins. The Major measured water out with an iron hand, because we’d have drunk ourselves into nephritis in a week otherwise. We were constantly, unceasingly thirsty. Ask the physiologists and psychiatrists why—they can give you have a dozen interesting reasons—but all we knew, or cared about, was that it happened to be so. We didn’t sleep the first few stops, as a consequence. Our eyes burned in spite of the filters and we had roaring headaches, but we couldn’t sleep them off. We sat around looking at each other. Then McIvers would say how good a beer would taste, and off we’d go. We’d have murdered our grandmothers for one ice-cold bottle of beer. After a few driving periods, I began to get my bearings at the wheel. We were moving down into desolation that made Earth’s old Death Valley look like a Japanese rose garden. Huge sun-baked cracks opened up in the floor of the gorge, with black cliffs jutting up on either side; the air was filled with a barely visible yellowish mist of sulfur and sulfurous gases. It was a hot, barren hole, no place for any man to go, but the challenge was so powerful you could almost feel it. No one had ever crossed this land before and escaped. Those who had tried it had been cruelly punished, but the land was still there, so it had to be crossed. Not the easy way. It had to be crossed the hardest way possible: overland, through anything the land could throw up to us, at the most difficult time possible. Yet we knew that even the land might have been conquered before, except for that Sun. We’d fought absolute cold before and won. We’d never fought heat like this and won. The only worse heat in the Solar System was the surface of the Sun itself. Brightside was worth trying for. We would get it or it would get us. That was the bargain. I learned a lot about Mercury those first few driving periods. The gorge petered out after a hundred miles and we moved onto the slope of a range of ragged craters that ran south and east. This range had shown no activity since the first landing on Mercury forty years before, but beyond it there were active cones. Yellow fumes rose from the craters constantly; their sides were shrouded with heavy ash. We couldn’t detect a wind, but we knew there was a hot, sulfurous breeze sweeping in great continental tides across the face of the planet. Not enough for erosion, though. The craters rose up out of jagged gorges, huge towering spears of rock and rubble. Below were the vast yellow flatlands, smoking and hissing from the gases beneath the crust. Over everything was gray dust—silicates and salts, pumice and limestone and granite ash, filling crevices and declivities—offering a soft, treacherous surface for the Bug’s pillow tires. I learned to read the ground, to tell a covered fault by the sag of the dust; I learned to spot a passable crack, and tell it from an impassable cut. Time after time the Bugs ground to a halt while we explored a passage on foot, tied together with light copper cable, digging, advancing, digging some more until we were sure the surface would carry the machines. It was cruel work; we slept in exhaustion. But it went smoothly, at first. Too smoothly, it seemed to me, and the others seemed to think so, too. McIvers’ restlessness was beginning to grate on our nerves. He talked too much, while we were resting or while we were driving; wisecracks, witticisms, unfunny jokes that wore thin with repetition. He took to making side trips from the route now and then, never far, but a little further each time. Jack Stone reacted quite the opposite; he grew quieter with each stop, more reserved and apprehensive. I didn’t like it, but I figured that it would pass off after a while. I was apprehensive enough myself; I just managed to hide it better. And every mile the Sun got bigger and whiter and higher in the sky and hotter. Without our ultra-violet screens and glare filters we would have been blinded; as it was our eyes ached constantly and the skin on our faces itched and tingled at the end of an eight-hour trek. But it took one of those side trips of McIvers’ to deliver the penultimate blow to our already fraying nerves. He had driven down a side-branch of a long canyon running off west of our route and was almost out of sight in a cloud of ash when we heard a sharp cry through our earphones. I wheeled my Bug around with my heart in my throat and spotted him through the binocs, waving frantically from the top of his machine. The Major and I took off, lumbering down the gulch after him as fast as the Bugs could go, with a thousand horrible pictures racing through our minds.... We found him standing stock-still, pointing down the gorge and, for once, he didn’t have anything to say. It was the wreck of a Bug; an old-fashioned half-track model of the sort that hadn’t been in use for years. It was wedged tight in a cut in the rock, an axle broken, its casing split wide open up the middle, half-buried in a rock slide. A dozen feet away were two insulated suits with white bones gleaming through the fiberglass helmets. This was as far as Wyatt and Carpenter had gotten on their Brightside Crossing. On the fifth driving period out, the terrain began to change. It looked the same, but every now and then it felt different. On two occasions I felt my wheels spin, with a howl of protest from my engine. Then, quite suddenly, the Bug gave a lurch; I gunned my motor and nothing happened. I could see the dull gray stuff seeping up around the hubs, thick and tenacious, splattering around in steaming gobs as the wheels spun. I knew what had happened the moment the wheels gave and, a few minutes later, they chained me to the tractor and dragged me back out of the mire. It looked for all the world like thick gray mud, but it was a pit of molten lead, steaming under a soft layer of concealing ash. I picked my way more cautiously then. We were getting into an area of recent surface activity; the surface was really treacherous. I caught myself wishing that the Major had okayed McIvers’ scheme for an advanced scout; more dangerous for the individual, maybe, but I was driving blind now and I didn’t like it. One error in judgment could sink us all, but I wasn’t thinking much about the others. I was worried about me , plenty worried. I kept thinking, better McIvers should go than me. It wasn’t healthy thinking and I knew it, but I couldn’t get the thought out of my mind. It was a grueling eight hours and we slept poorly. Back in the Bug again, we moved still more slowly—edging out on a broad flat plateau, dodging a network of gaping surface cracks—winding back and forth in an effort to keep the machines on solid rock. I couldn’t see far ahead, because of the yellow haze rising from the cracks, so I was almost on top of it when I saw a sharp cut ahead where the surface dropped six feet beyond a deep crack. I let out a shout to halt the others; then I edged my Bug forward, peering at the cleft. It was deep and wide. I moved fifty yards to the left, then back to the right. There was only one place that looked like a possible crossing; a long, narrow ledge of gray stuff that lay down across a section of the fault like a ramp. Even as I watched it, I could feel the surface crust under the Bug trembling and saw the ledge shift over a few feet.

What is the significance of the Brightside Crossing?

1

Many climbers and explorers wish to take on the Brightside Crossing, but it seems as though the trip is nearly impossible. Wyatt and Carpenter, two famous explorers, attempted to make the trip across the hottest planetary surface in the solar system in 2082, and they never returned from the trip. Peter Claney is the only living man who has attempted the trip and made it back alive. He was not successful in his mission to cross the perihelion, so it can be assumed that he turned back towards The Twilight Lab after his teammates perished. Maps of the terrain are shoddy at best since, and the surface is ever changing. Volcanoes erupt, cracks appear, cliffs crumble, and photography and technology is not yet good enough to create detailed pictures of the surface that would allow explorers to create a definitive and safe route. Since the men must travel at least 70 miles a day, there can be zero detours. It’s a constant game of scanning the terrain and making last minute decisions about which way is safest. Peter Claney and his teammates are motivated almost entirely by their desire to be the first people to conquer The Brightside Crossing. They believe that The Brightside would get them or they would get The Brightside. There is no other way, and their fame and success makes the dangerous trip worth a try.

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Brightside Crossing by Alan E. Nourse JAMES BARON was not pleased to hear that he had had a visitor when he reached the Red Lion that evening. He had no stomach for mysteries, vast or trifling, and there were pressing things to think about at this time. Yet the doorman had flagged him as he came in from the street: “A thousand pardons, Mr. Baron. The gentleman—he would leave no name. He said you’d want to see him. He will be back by eight.” Now Baron drummed his fingers on the table top, staring about the quiet lounge. Street trade was discouraged at the Red Lion, gently but persuasively; the patrons were few in number. Across to the right was a group that Baron knew vaguely—Andean climbers, or at least two of them were. Over near the door he recognized old Balmer, who had mapped the first passage to the core of Vulcan Crater on Venus. Baron returned his smile with a nod. Then he settled back and waited impatiently for the intruder who demanded his time without justifying it. Presently a small, grizzled man crossed the room and sat down at Baron’s table. He was short and wiry. His face held no key to his age—he might have been thirty or a thousand—but he looked weary and immensely ugly. His cheeks and forehead were twisted and brown, with scars that were still healing. The stranger said, “I’m glad you waited. I’ve heard you’re planning to attempt the Brightside.” Baron stared at the man for a moment. “I see you can read telecasts,” he said coldly. “The news was correct. We are going to make a Brightside Crossing.” “At perihelion?” “Of course. When else?” The grizzled man searched Baron’s face for a moment without expression. Then he said slowly, “No, I’m afraid you’re not going to make the Crossing.” “Say, who are you, if you don’t mind?” Baron demanded. “The name is Claney,” said the stranger. There was a silence. Then: “Claney? Peter Claney?” “That’s right.” Baron’s eyes were wide with excitement, all trace of anger gone. “Great balls of fire, man— where have you been hiding? We’ve been trying to contact you for months!” “I know. I was hoping you’d quit looking and chuck the whole idea.” “Quit looking!” Baron bent forward over the table. “My friend, we’d given up hope, but we’ve never quit looking. Here, have a drink. There’s so much you can tell us.” His fingers were trembling. Peter Claney shook his head. “I can’t tell you anything you want to hear.” “But you’ve got to. You’re the only man on Earth who’s attempted a Brightside Crossing and lived through it! And the story you cleared for the news—it was nothing. We need details . Where did your equipment fall down? Where did you miscalculate? What were the trouble spots?” Baron jabbed a finger at Claney’s face. “That, for instance—epithelioma? Why? What was wrong with your glass? Your filters? We’ve got to know those things. If you can tell us, we can make it across where your attempt failed—” “You want to know why we failed?” asked Claney. “Of course we want to know. We have to know.” “It’s simple. We failed because it can’t be done. We couldn’t do it and neither can you. No human beings will ever cross the Brightside alive, not if they try for centuries.” “Nonsense,” Baron declared. “We will.” Claney shrugged. “I was there. I know what I’m saying. You can blame the equipment or the men—there were flaws in both quarters—but we just didn’t know what we were fighting. It was the planet that whipped us, that and the Sun . They’ll whip you, too, if you try it.” “Never,” said Baron. “Let me tell you,” Peter Claney said. I’d been interested in the Brightside for almost as long as I can remember (Claney said). I guess I was about ten when Wyatt and Carpenter made the last attempt—that was in 2082, I think. I followed the news stories like a tri-V serial and then I was heartbroken when they just disappeared. I know now that they were a pair of idiots, starting off without proper equipment, with practically no knowledge of surface conditions, without any charts—they couldn’t have made a hundred miles—but I didn’t know that then and it was a terrible tragedy. After that, I followed Sanderson’s work in the Twilight Lab up there and began to get Brightside into my blood, sure as death. But it was Mikuta’s idea to attempt a Crossing. Did you ever know Tom Mikuta? I don’t suppose you did. No, not Japanese—Polish-American. He was a major in the Interplanetary Service for some years and hung onto the title after he gave up his commission. He was with Armstrong on Mars during his Service days, did a good deal of the original mapping and surveying for the Colony there. I first met him on Venus; we spent five years together up there doing some of the nastiest exploring since the Matto Grasso. Then he made the attempt on Vulcan Crater that paved the way for Balmer a few years later. I’d always liked the Major—he was big and quiet and cool, the sort of guy who always had things figured a little further ahead than anyone else and always knew what to do in a tight place. Too many men in this game are all nerve and luck, with no judgment. The Major had both. He also had the kind of personality that could take a crew of wild men and make them work like a well-oiled machine across a thousand miles of Venus jungle. I liked him and I trusted him. He contacted me in New York and he was very casual at first. We spent an evening here at the Red Lion, talking about old times; he told me about the Vulcan business, and how he’d been out to see Sanderson and the Twilight Lab on Mercury, and how he preferred a hot trek to a cold one any day of the year—and then he wanted to know what I’d been doing since Venus and what my plans were. “No particular plans,” I told him. “Why?” He looked me over. “How much do you weigh, Peter?” I told him one-thirty-five. “That much!” he said. “Well, there can’t be much fat on you, at any rate. How do you take heat?” “You should know,” I said. “Venus was no icebox.” “No, I mean real heat.” Then I began to get it. “You’re planning a trip.” “That’s right. A hot trip.” He grinned at me. “Might be dangerous, too.” “What trip?” “Brightside of Mercury,” the Major said. I whistled cautiously. “At aphelion?” He threw his head back. “Why try a Crossing at aphelion? What have you done then? Four thousand miles of butcherous heat, just to have some joker come along, use your data and drum you out of the glory by crossing at perihelion forty-four days later? No, thanks. I want the Brightside without any nonsense about it.” He leaned across me eagerly. “I want to make a Crossing at perihelion and I want to cross on the surface. If a man can do that, he’s got Mercury. Until then, nobody’s got Mercury. I want Mercury—but I’ll need help getting it.” I’d thought of it a thousand times and never dared consider it. Nobody had, since Wyatt and Carpenter disappeared. Mercury turns on its axis in the same time that it wheels around the Sun, which means that the Brightside is always facing in. That makes the Brightside of Mercury at perihelion the hottest place in the Solar System, with one single exception: the surface of the Sun itself. It would be a hellish trek. Only a few men had ever learned just how hellish and they never came back to tell about it. It was a real hell’s Crossing, but someday, I thought, somebody would cross it. I wanted to be along. The Twilight Lab, near the northern pole of Mercury, was the obvious jumping-off place. The setup there wasn’t very extensive—a rocket landing, the labs and quarters for Sanderson’s crew sunk deep into the crust, and the tower that housed the Solar ’scope that Sanderson had built up there ten years before. Twilight Lab wasn’t particularly interested in the Brightside, of course—the Sun was Sanderson’s baby and he’d picked Mercury as the closest chunk of rock to the Sun that could hold his observatory. He’d chosen a good location, too. On Mercury, the Brightside temperature hits 770° F. at perihelion and the Darkside runs pretty constant at -410° F. No permanent installation with a human crew could survive at either extreme. But with Mercury’s wobble, the twilight zone between Brightside and Darkside offers something closer to survival temperatures. Sanderson built the Lab up near the pole, where the zone is about five miles wide, so the temperature only varies 50 to 60 degrees with the libration. The Solar ’scope could take that much change and they’d get good clear observation of the Sun for about seventy out of the eighty-eight days it takes the planet to wheel around. The Major was counting on Sanderson knowing something about Mercury as well as the Sun when we camped at the Lab to make final preparations. Sanderson did. He thought we’d lost our minds and he said so, but he gave us all the help he could. He spent a week briefing Jack Stone, the third member of our party, who had arrived with the supplies and equipment a few days earlier. Poor Jack met us at the rocket landing almost bawling, Sanderson had given him such a gloomy picture of what Brightside was like. Stone was a youngster—hardly twenty-five, I’d say—but he’d been with the Major at Vulcan and had begged to join this trek. I had a funny feeling that Jack really didn’t care for exploring too much, but he thought Mikuta was God, followed him around like a puppy. It didn’t matter to me as long as he knew what he was getting in for. You don’t go asking people in this game why they do it—they’re liable to get awfully uneasy and none of them can ever give you an answer that makes sense. Anyway, Stone had borrowed three men from the Lab, and had the supplies and equipment all lined up when we got there, ready to check and test. We dug right in. With plenty of funds—tri-V money and some government cash the Major had talked his way around—our equipment was new and good. Mikuta had done the designing and testing himself, with a big assist from Sanderson. We had four Bugs, three of them the light pillow-tire models, with special lead-cooled cut-in engines when the heat set in, and one heavy-duty tractor model for pulling the sledges. The Major went over them like a kid at the circus. Then he said, “Have you heard anything from McIvers?” “Who’s he?” Stone wanted to know. “He’ll be joining us. He’s a good man—got quite a name for climbing, back home.” The Major turned to me. “You’ve probably heard of him.” I’d heard plenty of stories about Ted McIvers and I wasn’t too happy to hear that he was joining us. “Kind of a daredevil, isn’t he?” “Maybe. He’s lucky and skillful. Where do you draw the line? We’ll need plenty of both.” “Have you ever worked with him?” I asked. “No. Are you worried?” “Not exactly. But Brightside is no place to count on luck.” The Major laughed. “I don’t think we need to worry about McIvers. We understood each other when I talked up the trip to him and we’re going to need each other too much to do any fooling around.” He turned back to the supply list. “Meanwhile, let’s get this stuff listed and packed. We’ll need to cut weight sharply and our time is short. Sanderson says we should leave in three days.” Two days later, McIvers hadn’t arrived. The Major didn’t say much about it. Stone was getting edgy and so was I. We spent the second day studying charts of the Brightside, such as they were. The best available were pretty poor, taken from so far out that the detail dissolved into blurs on blow-up. They showed the biggest ranges of peaks and craters and faults, and that was all. Still, we could use them to plan a broad outline of our course. “This range here,” the Major said as we crowded around the board, “is largely inactive, according to Sanderson. But these to the south and west could be active. Seismograph tracings suggest a lot of activity in that region, getting worse down toward the equator—not only volcanic, but sub-surface shifting.” Stone nodded. “Sanderson told me there was probably constant surface activity.” The Major shrugged. “Well, it’s treacherous, there’s no doubt of it. But the only way to avoid it is to travel over the Pole, which would lose us days and offer us no guarantee of less activity to the west. Now we might avoid some if we could find a pass through this range and cut sharp east—” It seemed that the more we considered the problem, the further we got from a solution. We knew there were active volcanoes on the Brightside—even on the Darkside, though surface activity there was pretty much slowed down and localized. But there were problems of atmosphere on Brightside, as well. There was an atmosphere and a constant atmospheric flow from Brightside to Darkside. Not much—the lighter gases had reached escape velocity and disappeared from Brightside millennia ago—but there was CO 2 , and nitrogen, and traces of other heavier gases. There was also an abundance of sulfur vapor, as well as carbon disulfide and sulfur dioxide. The atmospheric tide moved toward the Darkside, where it condensed, carrying enough volcanic ash with it for Sanderson to estimate the depth and nature of the surface upheavals on Brightside from his samplings. The trick was to find a passage that avoided those upheavals as far as possible. But in the final analysis, we were barely scraping the surface. The only way we would find out what was happening where was to be there. Finally, on the third day, McIvers blew in on a freight rocket from Venus. He’d missed the ship that the Major and I had taken by a few hours, and had conned his way to Venus in hopes of getting a hop from there. He didn’t seem too upset about it, as though this were his usual way of doing things and he couldn’t see why everyone should get so excited. He was a tall, rangy man with long, wavy hair prematurely gray, and the sort of eyes that looked like a climber’s—half-closed, sleepy, almost indolent, but capable of abrupt alertness. And he never stood still; he was always moving, always doing something with his hands, or talking, or pacing about. Evidently the Major decided not to press the issue of his arrival. There was still work to do, and an hour later we were running the final tests on the pressure suits. That evening, Stone and McIvers were thick as thieves, and everything was set for an early departure after we got some rest. “And that,” said Baron, finishing his drink and signaling the waiter for another pair, “was your first big mistake.” Peter Claney raised his eyebrows. “McIvers?” “Of course.” Claney shrugged, glanced at the small quiet tables around them. “There are lots of bizarre personalities around a place like this, and some of the best wouldn’t seem to be the most reliable at first glance. Anyway, personality problems weren’t our big problem right then. Equipment worried us first and route next.” Baron nodded in agreement. “What kind of suits did you have?” “The best insulating suits ever made,” said Claney. “Each one had an inner lining of a fiberglass modification, to avoid the clumsiness of asbestos, and carried the refrigerating unit and oxygen storage which we recharged from the sledges every eight hours. Outer layer carried a monomolecular chrome reflecting surface that made us glitter like Christmas trees. And we had a half-inch dead-air space under positive pressure between the two layers. Warning thermocouples, of course—at 770 degrees, it wouldn’t take much time to fry us to cinders if the suits failed somewhere.” “How about the Bugs?” “They were insulated, too, but we weren’t counting on them too much for protection.” “You weren’t!” Baron exclaimed. “Why not?” “We’d be in and out of them too much. They gave us mobility and storage, but we knew we’d have to do a lot of forward work on foot.” Claney smiled bitterly. “Which meant that we had an inch of fiberglass and a half-inch of dead air between us and a surface temperature where lead flowed like water and zinc was almost at melting point and the pools of sulfur in the shadows were boiling like oatmeal over a campfire.” Baron licked his lips. His fingers stroked the cool, wet glass as he set it down on the tablecloth. “Go on,” he said tautly. “You started on schedule?” “Oh, yes,” said Claney, “we started on schedule, all right. We just didn’t quite end on schedule, that was all. But I’m getting to that.” He settled back in his chair and continued. We jumped off from Twilight on a course due southeast with thirty days to make it to the Center of Brightside. If we could cross an average of seventy miles a day, we could hit Center exactly at perihelion, the point of Mercury’s closest approach to the Sun—which made Center the hottest part of the planet at the hottest it ever gets. The Sun was already huge and yellow over the horizon when we started, twice the size it appears on Earth. Every day that Sun would grow bigger and whiter, and every day the surface would get hotter. But once we reached Center, the job was only half done—we would still have to travel another two thousand miles to the opposite twilight zone. Sanderson was to meet us on the other side in the Laboratory’s scout ship, approximately sixty days from the time we jumped off. That was the plan, in outline. It was up to us to cross those seventy miles a day, no matter how hot it became, no matter what terrain we had to cross. Detours would be dangerous and time-consuming. Delays could cost us our lives. We all knew that. The Major briefed us on details an hour before we left. “Peter, you’ll take the lead Bug, the small one we stripped down for you. Stone and I will flank you on either side, giving you a hundred-yard lead. McIvers, you’ll have the job of dragging the sledges, so we’ll have to direct your course pretty closely. Peter’s job is to pick the passage at any given point. If there’s any doubt of safe passage, we’ll all explore ahead on foot before we risk the Bugs. Got that?” McIvers and Stone exchanged glances. McIvers said: “Jack and I were planning to change around. We figured he could take the sledges. That would give me a little more mobility.” The Major looked up sharply at Stone. “Do you buy that, Jack?” Stone shrugged. “I don’t mind. Mac wanted—” McIvers made an impatient gesture with his hands. “It doesn’t matter. I just feel better when I’m on the move. Does it make any difference?” “I guess it doesn’t,” said the Major. “Then you’ll flank Peter along with me. Right?” “Sure, sure.” McIvers pulled at his lower lip. “Who’s going to do the advance scouting?” “It sounds like I am,” I cut in. “We want to keep the lead Bug light as possible.” Mikuta nodded. “That’s right. Peter’s Bug is stripped down to the frame and wheels.” McIvers shook his head. “No, I mean the advance work. You need somebody out ahead—four or five miles, at least—to pick up the big flaws and active surface changes, don’t you?” He stared at the Major. “I mean, how can we tell what sort of a hole we may be moving into, unless we have a scout up ahead?” “That’s what we have the charts for,” the Major said sharply. “Charts! I’m talking about detail work. We don’t need to worry about the major topography. It’s the little faults you can’t see on the pictures that can kill us.” He tossed the charts down excitedly. “Look, let me take a Bug out ahead and work reconnaissance, keep five, maybe ten miles ahead of the column. I can stay on good solid ground, of course, but scan the area closely and radio back to Peter where to avoid the flaws. Then—” “No dice,” the Major broke in. “But why not? We could save ourselves days!” “I don’t care what we could save. We stay together. When we get to the Center, I want live men along with me. That means we stay within easy sight of each other at all times. Any climber knows that everybody is safer in a party than one man alone—any time, any place.” McIvers stared at him, his cheeks an angry red. Finally he gave a sullen nod. “Okay. If you say so.” “Well, I say so and I mean it. I don’t want any fancy stuff. We’re going to hit Center together, and finish the Crossing together. Got that?” McIvers nodded. Mikuta then looked at Stone and me and we nodded, too. “All right,” he said slowly. “Now that we’ve got it straight, let’s go.” It was hot. If I forget everything else about that trek, I’ll never forget that huge yellow Sun glaring down, without a break, hotter and hotter with every mile. We knew that the first few days would be the easiest and we were rested and fresh when we started down the long ragged gorge southeast of the Twilight Lab. I moved out first; back over my shoulder, I could see the Major and McIvers crawling out behind me, their pillow tires taking the rugged floor of the gorge smoothly. Behind them, Stone dragged the sledges. Even at only 30 per cent Earth gravity they were a strain on the big tractor, until the ski-blades bit into the fluffy volcanic ash blanketing the valley. We even had a path to follow for the first twenty miles. I kept my eyes pasted to the big polaroid binocs, picking out the track the early research teams had made out into the edge of Brightside. But in a couple of hours we rumbled past Sanderson’s little outpost observatory and the tracks stopped. We were in virgin territory and already the Sun was beginning to bite. We didn’t feel the heat so much those first days out. We saw it. The refrig units kept our skins at a nice comfortable seventy-five degrees Fahrenheit inside our suits, but our eyes watched that glaring Sun and the baked yellow rocks going past, and some nerve pathways got twisted up, somehow. We poured sweat as if we were in a superheated furnace. We drove eight hours and slept five. When a sleep period came due, we pulled the Bugs together into a square, threw up a light aluminum sun-shield and lay out in the dust and rocks. The sun-shield cut the temperature down sixty or seventy degrees, for whatever help that was. And then we ate from the forward sledge—sucking through tubes—protein, carbohydrates, bulk gelatin, vitamins. The Major measured water out with an iron hand, because we’d have drunk ourselves into nephritis in a week otherwise. We were constantly, unceasingly thirsty. Ask the physiologists and psychiatrists why—they can give you have a dozen interesting reasons—but all we knew, or cared about, was that it happened to be so. We didn’t sleep the first few stops, as a consequence. Our eyes burned in spite of the filters and we had roaring headaches, but we couldn’t sleep them off. We sat around looking at each other. Then McIvers would say how good a beer would taste, and off we’d go. We’d have murdered our grandmothers for one ice-cold bottle of beer. After a few driving periods, I began to get my bearings at the wheel. We were moving down into desolation that made Earth’s old Death Valley look like a Japanese rose garden. Huge sun-baked cracks opened up in the floor of the gorge, with black cliffs jutting up on either side; the air was filled with a barely visible yellowish mist of sulfur and sulfurous gases. It was a hot, barren hole, no place for any man to go, but the challenge was so powerful you could almost feel it. No one had ever crossed this land before and escaped. Those who had tried it had been cruelly punished, but the land was still there, so it had to be crossed. Not the easy way. It had to be crossed the hardest way possible: overland, through anything the land could throw up to us, at the most difficult time possible. Yet we knew that even the land might have been conquered before, except for that Sun. We’d fought absolute cold before and won. We’d never fought heat like this and won. The only worse heat in the Solar System was the surface of the Sun itself. Brightside was worth trying for. We would get it or it would get us. That was the bargain. I learned a lot about Mercury those first few driving periods. The gorge petered out after a hundred miles and we moved onto the slope of a range of ragged craters that ran south and east. This range had shown no activity since the first landing on Mercury forty years before, but beyond it there were active cones. Yellow fumes rose from the craters constantly; their sides were shrouded with heavy ash. We couldn’t detect a wind, but we knew there was a hot, sulfurous breeze sweeping in great continental tides across the face of the planet. Not enough for erosion, though. The craters rose up out of jagged gorges, huge towering spears of rock and rubble. Below were the vast yellow flatlands, smoking and hissing from the gases beneath the crust. Over everything was gray dust—silicates and salts, pumice and limestone and granite ash, filling crevices and declivities—offering a soft, treacherous surface for the Bug’s pillow tires. I learned to read the ground, to tell a covered fault by the sag of the dust; I learned to spot a passable crack, and tell it from an impassable cut. Time after time the Bugs ground to a halt while we explored a passage on foot, tied together with light copper cable, digging, advancing, digging some more until we were sure the surface would carry the machines. It was cruel work; we slept in exhaustion. But it went smoothly, at first. Too smoothly, it seemed to me, and the others seemed to think so, too. McIvers’ restlessness was beginning to grate on our nerves. He talked too much, while we were resting or while we were driving; wisecracks, witticisms, unfunny jokes that wore thin with repetition. He took to making side trips from the route now and then, never far, but a little further each time. Jack Stone reacted quite the opposite; he grew quieter with each stop, more reserved and apprehensive. I didn’t like it, but I figured that it would pass off after a while. I was apprehensive enough myself; I just managed to hide it better. And every mile the Sun got bigger and whiter and higher in the sky and hotter. Without our ultra-violet screens and glare filters we would have been blinded; as it was our eyes ached constantly and the skin on our faces itched and tingled at the end of an eight-hour trek. But it took one of those side trips of McIvers’ to deliver the penultimate blow to our already fraying nerves. He had driven down a side-branch of a long canyon running off west of our route and was almost out of sight in a cloud of ash when we heard a sharp cry through our earphones. I wheeled my Bug around with my heart in my throat and spotted him through the binocs, waving frantically from the top of his machine. The Major and I took off, lumbering down the gulch after him as fast as the Bugs could go, with a thousand horrible pictures racing through our minds.... We found him standing stock-still, pointing down the gorge and, for once, he didn’t have anything to say. It was the wreck of a Bug; an old-fashioned half-track model of the sort that hadn’t been in use for years. It was wedged tight in a cut in the rock, an axle broken, its casing split wide open up the middle, half-buried in a rock slide. A dozen feet away were two insulated suits with white bones gleaming through the fiberglass helmets. This was as far as Wyatt and Carpenter had gotten on their Brightside Crossing. On the fifth driving period out, the terrain began to change. It looked the same, but every now and then it felt different. On two occasions I felt my wheels spin, with a howl of protest from my engine. Then, quite suddenly, the Bug gave a lurch; I gunned my motor and nothing happened. I could see the dull gray stuff seeping up around the hubs, thick and tenacious, splattering around in steaming gobs as the wheels spun. I knew what had happened the moment the wheels gave and, a few minutes later, they chained me to the tractor and dragged me back out of the mire. It looked for all the world like thick gray mud, but it was a pit of molten lead, steaming under a soft layer of concealing ash. I picked my way more cautiously then. We were getting into an area of recent surface activity; the surface was really treacherous. I caught myself wishing that the Major had okayed McIvers’ scheme for an advanced scout; more dangerous for the individual, maybe, but I was driving blind now and I didn’t like it. One error in judgment could sink us all, but I wasn’t thinking much about the others. I was worried about me , plenty worried. I kept thinking, better McIvers should go than me. It wasn’t healthy thinking and I knew it, but I couldn’t get the thought out of my mind. It was a grueling eight hours and we slept poorly. Back in the Bug again, we moved still more slowly—edging out on a broad flat plateau, dodging a network of gaping surface cracks—winding back and forth in an effort to keep the machines on solid rock. I couldn’t see far ahead, because of the yellow haze rising from the cracks, so I was almost on top of it when I saw a sharp cut ahead where the surface dropped six feet beyond a deep crack. I let out a shout to halt the others; then I edged my Bug forward, peering at the cleft. It was deep and wide. I moved fifty yards to the left, then back to the right. There was only one place that looked like a possible crossing; a long, narrow ledge of gray stuff that lay down across a section of the fault like a ramp. Even as I watched it, I could feel the surface crust under the Bug trembling and saw the ledge shift over a few feet.

Who is Jack Stone, and what happens to him throughout the story?

6

Jack Stone arrives on the surface of Mercury around a week ahead of his partners. It’s revealed rather early on that Stone is not much of an explorer himself. His wits and genius make him an invaluable resource, but his heart wasn’t necessarily in the right place. Claney claims that Stone only came to follow Major Mikuta around, a man he deeply respected and admired. At barely 25 years old, Stone was the youngest member of the team. His experience with Mikuta at the Vulcan qualified him for the trek, or so he thought, and so he tagged along. His apprehension and anxiety about the trip are evident from the beginning. After Sanderson, the leader of an observatory on Mercury, explained how treacherous their journey was going to be, Stone almost cried. Once they begin their trek, Stone retreats further into himself. Jack’s job was to drag the sledges behind the rest of the crew. Possibly fed up by McIvers’ constant joking or tortured by the fear that he would be lost on this planet forever, Stone became a shell of himself. In the end, after McIvers discovered the corpses of the two discoverers that came before them, Wyatt and Carpenter, we can only assume that Stone’s fear and reservedness increased tremendously.

49165

Brightside Crossing by Alan E. Nourse JAMES BARON was not pleased to hear that he had had a visitor when he reached the Red Lion that evening. He had no stomach for mysteries, vast or trifling, and there were pressing things to think about at this time. Yet the doorman had flagged him as he came in from the street: “A thousand pardons, Mr. Baron. The gentleman—he would leave no name. He said you’d want to see him. He will be back by eight.” Now Baron drummed his fingers on the table top, staring about the quiet lounge. Street trade was discouraged at the Red Lion, gently but persuasively; the patrons were few in number. Across to the right was a group that Baron knew vaguely—Andean climbers, or at least two of them were. Over near the door he recognized old Balmer, who had mapped the first passage to the core of Vulcan Crater on Venus. Baron returned his smile with a nod. Then he settled back and waited impatiently for the intruder who demanded his time without justifying it. Presently a small, grizzled man crossed the room and sat down at Baron’s table. He was short and wiry. His face held no key to his age—he might have been thirty or a thousand—but he looked weary and immensely ugly. His cheeks and forehead were twisted and brown, with scars that were still healing. The stranger said, “I’m glad you waited. I’ve heard you’re planning to attempt the Brightside.” Baron stared at the man for a moment. “I see you can read telecasts,” he said coldly. “The news was correct. We are going to make a Brightside Crossing.” “At perihelion?” “Of course. When else?” The grizzled man searched Baron’s face for a moment without expression. Then he said slowly, “No, I’m afraid you’re not going to make the Crossing.” “Say, who are you, if you don’t mind?” Baron demanded. “The name is Claney,” said the stranger. There was a silence. Then: “Claney? Peter Claney?” “That’s right.” Baron’s eyes were wide with excitement, all trace of anger gone. “Great balls of fire, man— where have you been hiding? We’ve been trying to contact you for months!” “I know. I was hoping you’d quit looking and chuck the whole idea.” “Quit looking!” Baron bent forward over the table. “My friend, we’d given up hope, but we’ve never quit looking. Here, have a drink. There’s so much you can tell us.” His fingers were trembling. Peter Claney shook his head. “I can’t tell you anything you want to hear.” “But you’ve got to. You’re the only man on Earth who’s attempted a Brightside Crossing and lived through it! And the story you cleared for the news—it was nothing. We need details . Where did your equipment fall down? Where did you miscalculate? What were the trouble spots?” Baron jabbed a finger at Claney’s face. “That, for instance—epithelioma? Why? What was wrong with your glass? Your filters? We’ve got to know those things. If you can tell us, we can make it across where your attempt failed—” “You want to know why we failed?” asked Claney. “Of course we want to know. We have to know.” “It’s simple. We failed because it can’t be done. We couldn’t do it and neither can you. No human beings will ever cross the Brightside alive, not if they try for centuries.” “Nonsense,” Baron declared. “We will.” Claney shrugged. “I was there. I know what I’m saying. You can blame the equipment or the men—there were flaws in both quarters—but we just didn’t know what we were fighting. It was the planet that whipped us, that and the Sun . They’ll whip you, too, if you try it.” “Never,” said Baron. “Let me tell you,” Peter Claney said. I’d been interested in the Brightside for almost as long as I can remember (Claney said). I guess I was about ten when Wyatt and Carpenter made the last attempt—that was in 2082, I think. I followed the news stories like a tri-V serial and then I was heartbroken when they just disappeared. I know now that they were a pair of idiots, starting off without proper equipment, with practically no knowledge of surface conditions, without any charts—they couldn’t have made a hundred miles—but I didn’t know that then and it was a terrible tragedy. After that, I followed Sanderson’s work in the Twilight Lab up there and began to get Brightside into my blood, sure as death. But it was Mikuta’s idea to attempt a Crossing. Did you ever know Tom Mikuta? I don’t suppose you did. No, not Japanese—Polish-American. He was a major in the Interplanetary Service for some years and hung onto the title after he gave up his commission. He was with Armstrong on Mars during his Service days, did a good deal of the original mapping and surveying for the Colony there. I first met him on Venus; we spent five years together up there doing some of the nastiest exploring since the Matto Grasso. Then he made the attempt on Vulcan Crater that paved the way for Balmer a few years later. I’d always liked the Major—he was big and quiet and cool, the sort of guy who always had things figured a little further ahead than anyone else and always knew what to do in a tight place. Too many men in this game are all nerve and luck, with no judgment. The Major had both. He also had the kind of personality that could take a crew of wild men and make them work like a well-oiled machine across a thousand miles of Venus jungle. I liked him and I trusted him. He contacted me in New York and he was very casual at first. We spent an evening here at the Red Lion, talking about old times; he told me about the Vulcan business, and how he’d been out to see Sanderson and the Twilight Lab on Mercury, and how he preferred a hot trek to a cold one any day of the year—and then he wanted to know what I’d been doing since Venus and what my plans were. “No particular plans,” I told him. “Why?” He looked me over. “How much do you weigh, Peter?” I told him one-thirty-five. “That much!” he said. “Well, there can’t be much fat on you, at any rate. How do you take heat?” “You should know,” I said. “Venus was no icebox.” “No, I mean real heat.” Then I began to get it. “You’re planning a trip.” “That’s right. A hot trip.” He grinned at me. “Might be dangerous, too.” “What trip?” “Brightside of Mercury,” the Major said. I whistled cautiously. “At aphelion?” He threw his head back. “Why try a Crossing at aphelion? What have you done then? Four thousand miles of butcherous heat, just to have some joker come along, use your data and drum you out of the glory by crossing at perihelion forty-four days later? No, thanks. I want the Brightside without any nonsense about it.” He leaned across me eagerly. “I want to make a Crossing at perihelion and I want to cross on the surface. If a man can do that, he’s got Mercury. Until then, nobody’s got Mercury. I want Mercury—but I’ll need help getting it.” I’d thought of it a thousand times and never dared consider it. Nobody had, since Wyatt and Carpenter disappeared. Mercury turns on its axis in the same time that it wheels around the Sun, which means that the Brightside is always facing in. That makes the Brightside of Mercury at perihelion the hottest place in the Solar System, with one single exception: the surface of the Sun itself. It would be a hellish trek. Only a few men had ever learned just how hellish and they never came back to tell about it. It was a real hell’s Crossing, but someday, I thought, somebody would cross it. I wanted to be along. The Twilight Lab, near the northern pole of Mercury, was the obvious jumping-off place. The setup there wasn’t very extensive—a rocket landing, the labs and quarters for Sanderson’s crew sunk deep into the crust, and the tower that housed the Solar ’scope that Sanderson had built up there ten years before. Twilight Lab wasn’t particularly interested in the Brightside, of course—the Sun was Sanderson’s baby and he’d picked Mercury as the closest chunk of rock to the Sun that could hold his observatory. He’d chosen a good location, too. On Mercury, the Brightside temperature hits 770° F. at perihelion and the Darkside runs pretty constant at -410° F. No permanent installation with a human crew could survive at either extreme. But with Mercury’s wobble, the twilight zone between Brightside and Darkside offers something closer to survival temperatures. Sanderson built the Lab up near the pole, where the zone is about five miles wide, so the temperature only varies 50 to 60 degrees with the libration. The Solar ’scope could take that much change and they’d get good clear observation of the Sun for about seventy out of the eighty-eight days it takes the planet to wheel around. The Major was counting on Sanderson knowing something about Mercury as well as the Sun when we camped at the Lab to make final preparations. Sanderson did. He thought we’d lost our minds and he said so, but he gave us all the help he could. He spent a week briefing Jack Stone, the third member of our party, who had arrived with the supplies and equipment a few days earlier. Poor Jack met us at the rocket landing almost bawling, Sanderson had given him such a gloomy picture of what Brightside was like. Stone was a youngster—hardly twenty-five, I’d say—but he’d been with the Major at Vulcan and had begged to join this trek. I had a funny feeling that Jack really didn’t care for exploring too much, but he thought Mikuta was God, followed him around like a puppy. It didn’t matter to me as long as he knew what he was getting in for. You don’t go asking people in this game why they do it—they’re liable to get awfully uneasy and none of them can ever give you an answer that makes sense. Anyway, Stone had borrowed three men from the Lab, and had the supplies and equipment all lined up when we got there, ready to check and test. We dug right in. With plenty of funds—tri-V money and some government cash the Major had talked his way around—our equipment was new and good. Mikuta had done the designing and testing himself, with a big assist from Sanderson. We had four Bugs, three of them the light pillow-tire models, with special lead-cooled cut-in engines when the heat set in, and one heavy-duty tractor model for pulling the sledges. The Major went over them like a kid at the circus. Then he said, “Have you heard anything from McIvers?” “Who’s he?” Stone wanted to know. “He’ll be joining us. He’s a good man—got quite a name for climbing, back home.” The Major turned to me. “You’ve probably heard of him.” I’d heard plenty of stories about Ted McIvers and I wasn’t too happy to hear that he was joining us. “Kind of a daredevil, isn’t he?” “Maybe. He’s lucky and skillful. Where do you draw the line? We’ll need plenty of both.” “Have you ever worked with him?” I asked. “No. Are you worried?” “Not exactly. But Brightside is no place to count on luck.” The Major laughed. “I don’t think we need to worry about McIvers. We understood each other when I talked up the trip to him and we’re going to need each other too much to do any fooling around.” He turned back to the supply list. “Meanwhile, let’s get this stuff listed and packed. We’ll need to cut weight sharply and our time is short. Sanderson says we should leave in three days.” Two days later, McIvers hadn’t arrived. The Major didn’t say much about it. Stone was getting edgy and so was I. We spent the second day studying charts of the Brightside, such as they were. The best available were pretty poor, taken from so far out that the detail dissolved into blurs on blow-up. They showed the biggest ranges of peaks and craters and faults, and that was all. Still, we could use them to plan a broad outline of our course. “This range here,” the Major said as we crowded around the board, “is largely inactive, according to Sanderson. But these to the south and west could be active. Seismograph tracings suggest a lot of activity in that region, getting worse down toward the equator—not only volcanic, but sub-surface shifting.” Stone nodded. “Sanderson told me there was probably constant surface activity.” The Major shrugged. “Well, it’s treacherous, there’s no doubt of it. But the only way to avoid it is to travel over the Pole, which would lose us days and offer us no guarantee of less activity to the west. Now we might avoid some if we could find a pass through this range and cut sharp east—” It seemed that the more we considered the problem, the further we got from a solution. We knew there were active volcanoes on the Brightside—even on the Darkside, though surface activity there was pretty much slowed down and localized. But there were problems of atmosphere on Brightside, as well. There was an atmosphere and a constant atmospheric flow from Brightside to Darkside. Not much—the lighter gases had reached escape velocity and disappeared from Brightside millennia ago—but there was CO 2 , and nitrogen, and traces of other heavier gases. There was also an abundance of sulfur vapor, as well as carbon disulfide and sulfur dioxide. The atmospheric tide moved toward the Darkside, where it condensed, carrying enough volcanic ash with it for Sanderson to estimate the depth and nature of the surface upheavals on Brightside from his samplings. The trick was to find a passage that avoided those upheavals as far as possible. But in the final analysis, we were barely scraping the surface. The only way we would find out what was happening where was to be there. Finally, on the third day, McIvers blew in on a freight rocket from Venus. He’d missed the ship that the Major and I had taken by a few hours, and had conned his way to Venus in hopes of getting a hop from there. He didn’t seem too upset about it, as though this were his usual way of doing things and he couldn’t see why everyone should get so excited. He was a tall, rangy man with long, wavy hair prematurely gray, and the sort of eyes that looked like a climber’s—half-closed, sleepy, almost indolent, but capable of abrupt alertness. And he never stood still; he was always moving, always doing something with his hands, or talking, or pacing about. Evidently the Major decided not to press the issue of his arrival. There was still work to do, and an hour later we were running the final tests on the pressure suits. That evening, Stone and McIvers were thick as thieves, and everything was set for an early departure after we got some rest. “And that,” said Baron, finishing his drink and signaling the waiter for another pair, “was your first big mistake.” Peter Claney raised his eyebrows. “McIvers?” “Of course.” Claney shrugged, glanced at the small quiet tables around them. “There are lots of bizarre personalities around a place like this, and some of the best wouldn’t seem to be the most reliable at first glance. Anyway, personality problems weren’t our big problem right then. Equipment worried us first and route next.” Baron nodded in agreement. “What kind of suits did you have?” “The best insulating suits ever made,” said Claney. “Each one had an inner lining of a fiberglass modification, to avoid the clumsiness of asbestos, and carried the refrigerating unit and oxygen storage which we recharged from the sledges every eight hours. Outer layer carried a monomolecular chrome reflecting surface that made us glitter like Christmas trees. And we had a half-inch dead-air space under positive pressure between the two layers. Warning thermocouples, of course—at 770 degrees, it wouldn’t take much time to fry us to cinders if the suits failed somewhere.” “How about the Bugs?” “They were insulated, too, but we weren’t counting on them too much for protection.” “You weren’t!” Baron exclaimed. “Why not?” “We’d be in and out of them too much. They gave us mobility and storage, but we knew we’d have to do a lot of forward work on foot.” Claney smiled bitterly. “Which meant that we had an inch of fiberglass and a half-inch of dead air between us and a surface temperature where lead flowed like water and zinc was almost at melting point and the pools of sulfur in the shadows were boiling like oatmeal over a campfire.” Baron licked his lips. His fingers stroked the cool, wet glass as he set it down on the tablecloth. “Go on,” he said tautly. “You started on schedule?” “Oh, yes,” said Claney, “we started on schedule, all right. We just didn’t quite end on schedule, that was all. But I’m getting to that.” He settled back in his chair and continued. We jumped off from Twilight on a course due southeast with thirty days to make it to the Center of Brightside. If we could cross an average of seventy miles a day, we could hit Center exactly at perihelion, the point of Mercury’s closest approach to the Sun—which made Center the hottest part of the planet at the hottest it ever gets. The Sun was already huge and yellow over the horizon when we started, twice the size it appears on Earth. Every day that Sun would grow bigger and whiter, and every day the surface would get hotter. But once we reached Center, the job was only half done—we would still have to travel another two thousand miles to the opposite twilight zone. Sanderson was to meet us on the other side in the Laboratory’s scout ship, approximately sixty days from the time we jumped off. That was the plan, in outline. It was up to us to cross those seventy miles a day, no matter how hot it became, no matter what terrain we had to cross. Detours would be dangerous and time-consuming. Delays could cost us our lives. We all knew that. The Major briefed us on details an hour before we left. “Peter, you’ll take the lead Bug, the small one we stripped down for you. Stone and I will flank you on either side, giving you a hundred-yard lead. McIvers, you’ll have the job of dragging the sledges, so we’ll have to direct your course pretty closely. Peter’s job is to pick the passage at any given point. If there’s any doubt of safe passage, we’ll all explore ahead on foot before we risk the Bugs. Got that?” McIvers and Stone exchanged glances. McIvers said: “Jack and I were planning to change around. We figured he could take the sledges. That would give me a little more mobility.” The Major looked up sharply at Stone. “Do you buy that, Jack?” Stone shrugged. “I don’t mind. Mac wanted—” McIvers made an impatient gesture with his hands. “It doesn’t matter. I just feel better when I’m on the move. Does it make any difference?” “I guess it doesn’t,” said the Major. “Then you’ll flank Peter along with me. Right?” “Sure, sure.” McIvers pulled at his lower lip. “Who’s going to do the advance scouting?” “It sounds like I am,” I cut in. “We want to keep the lead Bug light as possible.” Mikuta nodded. “That’s right. Peter’s Bug is stripped down to the frame and wheels.” McIvers shook his head. “No, I mean the advance work. You need somebody out ahead—four or five miles, at least—to pick up the big flaws and active surface changes, don’t you?” He stared at the Major. “I mean, how can we tell what sort of a hole we may be moving into, unless we have a scout up ahead?” “That’s what we have the charts for,” the Major said sharply. “Charts! I’m talking about detail work. We don’t need to worry about the major topography. It’s the little faults you can’t see on the pictures that can kill us.” He tossed the charts down excitedly. “Look, let me take a Bug out ahead and work reconnaissance, keep five, maybe ten miles ahead of the column. I can stay on good solid ground, of course, but scan the area closely and radio back to Peter where to avoid the flaws. Then—” “No dice,” the Major broke in. “But why not? We could save ourselves days!” “I don’t care what we could save. We stay together. When we get to the Center, I want live men along with me. That means we stay within easy sight of each other at all times. Any climber knows that everybody is safer in a party than one man alone—any time, any place.” McIvers stared at him, his cheeks an angry red. Finally he gave a sullen nod. “Okay. If you say so.” “Well, I say so and I mean it. I don’t want any fancy stuff. We’re going to hit Center together, and finish the Crossing together. Got that?” McIvers nodded. Mikuta then looked at Stone and me and we nodded, too. “All right,” he said slowly. “Now that we’ve got it straight, let’s go.” It was hot. If I forget everything else about that trek, I’ll never forget that huge yellow Sun glaring down, without a break, hotter and hotter with every mile. We knew that the first few days would be the easiest and we were rested and fresh when we started down the long ragged gorge southeast of the Twilight Lab. I moved out first; back over my shoulder, I could see the Major and McIvers crawling out behind me, their pillow tires taking the rugged floor of the gorge smoothly. Behind them, Stone dragged the sledges. Even at only 30 per cent Earth gravity they were a strain on the big tractor, until the ski-blades bit into the fluffy volcanic ash blanketing the valley. We even had a path to follow for the first twenty miles. I kept my eyes pasted to the big polaroid binocs, picking out the track the early research teams had made out into the edge of Brightside. But in a couple of hours we rumbled past Sanderson’s little outpost observatory and the tracks stopped. We were in virgin territory and already the Sun was beginning to bite. We didn’t feel the heat so much those first days out. We saw it. The refrig units kept our skins at a nice comfortable seventy-five degrees Fahrenheit inside our suits, but our eyes watched that glaring Sun and the baked yellow rocks going past, and some nerve pathways got twisted up, somehow. We poured sweat as if we were in a superheated furnace. We drove eight hours and slept five. When a sleep period came due, we pulled the Bugs together into a square, threw up a light aluminum sun-shield and lay out in the dust and rocks. The sun-shield cut the temperature down sixty or seventy degrees, for whatever help that was. And then we ate from the forward sledge—sucking through tubes—protein, carbohydrates, bulk gelatin, vitamins. The Major measured water out with an iron hand, because we’d have drunk ourselves into nephritis in a week otherwise. We were constantly, unceasingly thirsty. Ask the physiologists and psychiatrists why—they can give you have a dozen interesting reasons—but all we knew, or cared about, was that it happened to be so. We didn’t sleep the first few stops, as a consequence. Our eyes burned in spite of the filters and we had roaring headaches, but we couldn’t sleep them off. We sat around looking at each other. Then McIvers would say how good a beer would taste, and off we’d go. We’d have murdered our grandmothers for one ice-cold bottle of beer. After a few driving periods, I began to get my bearings at the wheel. We were moving down into desolation that made Earth’s old Death Valley look like a Japanese rose garden. Huge sun-baked cracks opened up in the floor of the gorge, with black cliffs jutting up on either side; the air was filled with a barely visible yellowish mist of sulfur and sulfurous gases. It was a hot, barren hole, no place for any man to go, but the challenge was so powerful you could almost feel it. No one had ever crossed this land before and escaped. Those who had tried it had been cruelly punished, but the land was still there, so it had to be crossed. Not the easy way. It had to be crossed the hardest way possible: overland, through anything the land could throw up to us, at the most difficult time possible. Yet we knew that even the land might have been conquered before, except for that Sun. We’d fought absolute cold before and won. We’d never fought heat like this and won. The only worse heat in the Solar System was the surface of the Sun itself. Brightside was worth trying for. We would get it or it would get us. That was the bargain. I learned a lot about Mercury those first few driving periods. The gorge petered out after a hundred miles and we moved onto the slope of a range of ragged craters that ran south and east. This range had shown no activity since the first landing on Mercury forty years before, but beyond it there were active cones. Yellow fumes rose from the craters constantly; their sides were shrouded with heavy ash. We couldn’t detect a wind, but we knew there was a hot, sulfurous breeze sweeping in great continental tides across the face of the planet. Not enough for erosion, though. The craters rose up out of jagged gorges, huge towering spears of rock and rubble. Below were the vast yellow flatlands, smoking and hissing from the gases beneath the crust. Over everything was gray dust—silicates and salts, pumice and limestone and granite ash, filling crevices and declivities—offering a soft, treacherous surface for the Bug’s pillow tires. I learned to read the ground, to tell a covered fault by the sag of the dust; I learned to spot a passable crack, and tell it from an impassable cut. Time after time the Bugs ground to a halt while we explored a passage on foot, tied together with light copper cable, digging, advancing, digging some more until we were sure the surface would carry the machines. It was cruel work; we slept in exhaustion. But it went smoothly, at first. Too smoothly, it seemed to me, and the others seemed to think so, too. McIvers’ restlessness was beginning to grate on our nerves. He talked too much, while we were resting or while we were driving; wisecracks, witticisms, unfunny jokes that wore thin with repetition. He took to making side trips from the route now and then, never far, but a little further each time. Jack Stone reacted quite the opposite; he grew quieter with each stop, more reserved and apprehensive. I didn’t like it, but I figured that it would pass off after a while. I was apprehensive enough myself; I just managed to hide it better. And every mile the Sun got bigger and whiter and higher in the sky and hotter. Without our ultra-violet screens and glare filters we would have been blinded; as it was our eyes ached constantly and the skin on our faces itched and tingled at the end of an eight-hour trek. But it took one of those side trips of McIvers’ to deliver the penultimate blow to our already fraying nerves. He had driven down a side-branch of a long canyon running off west of our route and was almost out of sight in a cloud of ash when we heard a sharp cry through our earphones. I wheeled my Bug around with my heart in my throat and spotted him through the binocs, waving frantically from the top of his machine. The Major and I took off, lumbering down the gulch after him as fast as the Bugs could go, with a thousand horrible pictures racing through our minds.... We found him standing stock-still, pointing down the gorge and, for once, he didn’t have anything to say. It was the wreck of a Bug; an old-fashioned half-track model of the sort that hadn’t been in use for years. It was wedged tight in a cut in the rock, an axle broken, its casing split wide open up the middle, half-buried in a rock slide. A dozen feet away were two insulated suits with white bones gleaming through the fiberglass helmets. This was as far as Wyatt and Carpenter had gotten on their Brightside Crossing. On the fifth driving period out, the terrain began to change. It looked the same, but every now and then it felt different. On two occasions I felt my wheels spin, with a howl of protest from my engine. Then, quite suddenly, the Bug gave a lurch; I gunned my motor and nothing happened. I could see the dull gray stuff seeping up around the hubs, thick and tenacious, splattering around in steaming gobs as the wheels spun. I knew what had happened the moment the wheels gave and, a few minutes later, they chained me to the tractor and dragged me back out of the mire. It looked for all the world like thick gray mud, but it was a pit of molten lead, steaming under a soft layer of concealing ash. I picked my way more cautiously then. We were getting into an area of recent surface activity; the surface was really treacherous. I caught myself wishing that the Major had okayed McIvers’ scheme for an advanced scout; more dangerous for the individual, maybe, but I was driving blind now and I didn’t like it. One error in judgment could sink us all, but I wasn’t thinking much about the others. I was worried about me , plenty worried. I kept thinking, better McIvers should go than me. It wasn’t healthy thinking and I knew it, but I couldn’t get the thought out of my mind. It was a grueling eight hours and we slept poorly. Back in the Bug again, we moved still more slowly—edging out on a broad flat plateau, dodging a network of gaping surface cracks—winding back and forth in an effort to keep the machines on solid rock. I couldn’t see far ahead, because of the yellow haze rising from the cracks, so I was almost on top of it when I saw a sharp cut ahead where the surface dropped six feet beyond a deep crack. I let out a shout to halt the others; then I edged my Bug forward, peering at the cleft. It was deep and wide. I moved fifty yards to the left, then back to the right. There was only one place that looked like a possible crossing; a long, narrow ledge of gray stuff that lay down across a section of the fault like a ramp. Even as I watched it, I could feel the surface crust under the Bug trembling and saw the ledge shift over a few feet.

Who is Jack Stone, and what happens to him throughout the story?

10

Jack Stone is one of the explorers the Major recruits for his expedition. He is hardly twenty-five years old and crewed on the Major’s vulcan explorations. Peter’s assessment of Stone is that he follows the Major around like a puppy and begged to come on the Brightside Crossing. Stone has the important role of bringing the supplies and equipment for their crossing. He receives some information about the inhospitable conditions of the Brightside from Sanders (owner of the Twilight Lab) that dejects him and makes him nervous about their trip. Stone has the important role of dragging the sleds of supplies during their crossing. He does not irritate the rest of the team, but instead grows more quiet and apprehensive with each day. The reader doesn’t know whether he survived the attempted crossing or what he did afterwards.

49165

Brightside Crossing by Alan E. Nourse JAMES BARON was not pleased to hear that he had had a visitor when he reached the Red Lion that evening. He had no stomach for mysteries, vast or trifling, and there were pressing things to think about at this time. Yet the doorman had flagged him as he came in from the street: “A thousand pardons, Mr. Baron. The gentleman—he would leave no name. He said you’d want to see him. He will be back by eight.” Now Baron drummed his fingers on the table top, staring about the quiet lounge. Street trade was discouraged at the Red Lion, gently but persuasively; the patrons were few in number. Across to the right was a group that Baron knew vaguely—Andean climbers, or at least two of them were. Over near the door he recognized old Balmer, who had mapped the first passage to the core of Vulcan Crater on Venus. Baron returned his smile with a nod. Then he settled back and waited impatiently for the intruder who demanded his time without justifying it. Presently a small, grizzled man crossed the room and sat down at Baron’s table. He was short and wiry. His face held no key to his age—he might have been thirty or a thousand—but he looked weary and immensely ugly. His cheeks and forehead were twisted and brown, with scars that were still healing. The stranger said, “I’m glad you waited. I’ve heard you’re planning to attempt the Brightside.” Baron stared at the man for a moment. “I see you can read telecasts,” he said coldly. “The news was correct. We are going to make a Brightside Crossing.” “At perihelion?” “Of course. When else?” The grizzled man searched Baron’s face for a moment without expression. Then he said slowly, “No, I’m afraid you’re not going to make the Crossing.” “Say, who are you, if you don’t mind?” Baron demanded. “The name is Claney,” said the stranger. There was a silence. Then: “Claney? Peter Claney?” “That’s right.” Baron’s eyes were wide with excitement, all trace of anger gone. “Great balls of fire, man— where have you been hiding? We’ve been trying to contact you for months!” “I know. I was hoping you’d quit looking and chuck the whole idea.” “Quit looking!” Baron bent forward over the table. “My friend, we’d given up hope, but we’ve never quit looking. Here, have a drink. There’s so much you can tell us.” His fingers were trembling. Peter Claney shook his head. “I can’t tell you anything you want to hear.” “But you’ve got to. You’re the only man on Earth who’s attempted a Brightside Crossing and lived through it! And the story you cleared for the news—it was nothing. We need details . Where did your equipment fall down? Where did you miscalculate? What were the trouble spots?” Baron jabbed a finger at Claney’s face. “That, for instance—epithelioma? Why? What was wrong with your glass? Your filters? We’ve got to know those things. If you can tell us, we can make it across where your attempt failed—” “You want to know why we failed?” asked Claney. “Of course we want to know. We have to know.” “It’s simple. We failed because it can’t be done. We couldn’t do it and neither can you. No human beings will ever cross the Brightside alive, not if they try for centuries.” “Nonsense,” Baron declared. “We will.” Claney shrugged. “I was there. I know what I’m saying. You can blame the equipment or the men—there were flaws in both quarters—but we just didn’t know what we were fighting. It was the planet that whipped us, that and the Sun . They’ll whip you, too, if you try it.” “Never,” said Baron. “Let me tell you,” Peter Claney said. I’d been interested in the Brightside for almost as long as I can remember (Claney said). I guess I was about ten when Wyatt and Carpenter made the last attempt—that was in 2082, I think. I followed the news stories like a tri-V serial and then I was heartbroken when they just disappeared. I know now that they were a pair of idiots, starting off without proper equipment, with practically no knowledge of surface conditions, without any charts—they couldn’t have made a hundred miles—but I didn’t know that then and it was a terrible tragedy. After that, I followed Sanderson’s work in the Twilight Lab up there and began to get Brightside into my blood, sure as death. But it was Mikuta’s idea to attempt a Crossing. Did you ever know Tom Mikuta? I don’t suppose you did. No, not Japanese—Polish-American. He was a major in the Interplanetary Service for some years and hung onto the title after he gave up his commission. He was with Armstrong on Mars during his Service days, did a good deal of the original mapping and surveying for the Colony there. I first met him on Venus; we spent five years together up there doing some of the nastiest exploring since the Matto Grasso. Then he made the attempt on Vulcan Crater that paved the way for Balmer a few years later. I’d always liked the Major—he was big and quiet and cool, the sort of guy who always had things figured a little further ahead than anyone else and always knew what to do in a tight place. Too many men in this game are all nerve and luck, with no judgment. The Major had both. He also had the kind of personality that could take a crew of wild men and make them work like a well-oiled machine across a thousand miles of Venus jungle. I liked him and I trusted him. He contacted me in New York and he was very casual at first. We spent an evening here at the Red Lion, talking about old times; he told me about the Vulcan business, and how he’d been out to see Sanderson and the Twilight Lab on Mercury, and how he preferred a hot trek to a cold one any day of the year—and then he wanted to know what I’d been doing since Venus and what my plans were. “No particular plans,” I told him. “Why?” He looked me over. “How much do you weigh, Peter?” I told him one-thirty-five. “That much!” he said. “Well, there can’t be much fat on you, at any rate. How do you take heat?” “You should know,” I said. “Venus was no icebox.” “No, I mean real heat.” Then I began to get it. “You’re planning a trip.” “That’s right. A hot trip.” He grinned at me. “Might be dangerous, too.” “What trip?” “Brightside of Mercury,” the Major said. I whistled cautiously. “At aphelion?” He threw his head back. “Why try a Crossing at aphelion? What have you done then? Four thousand miles of butcherous heat, just to have some joker come along, use your data and drum you out of the glory by crossing at perihelion forty-four days later? No, thanks. I want the Brightside without any nonsense about it.” He leaned across me eagerly. “I want to make a Crossing at perihelion and I want to cross on the surface. If a man can do that, he’s got Mercury. Until then, nobody’s got Mercury. I want Mercury—but I’ll need help getting it.” I’d thought of it a thousand times and never dared consider it. Nobody had, since Wyatt and Carpenter disappeared. Mercury turns on its axis in the same time that it wheels around the Sun, which means that the Brightside is always facing in. That makes the Brightside of Mercury at perihelion the hottest place in the Solar System, with one single exception: the surface of the Sun itself. It would be a hellish trek. Only a few men had ever learned just how hellish and they never came back to tell about it. It was a real hell’s Crossing, but someday, I thought, somebody would cross it. I wanted to be along. The Twilight Lab, near the northern pole of Mercury, was the obvious jumping-off place. The setup there wasn’t very extensive—a rocket landing, the labs and quarters for Sanderson’s crew sunk deep into the crust, and the tower that housed the Solar ’scope that Sanderson had built up there ten years before. Twilight Lab wasn’t particularly interested in the Brightside, of course—the Sun was Sanderson’s baby and he’d picked Mercury as the closest chunk of rock to the Sun that could hold his observatory. He’d chosen a good location, too. On Mercury, the Brightside temperature hits 770° F. at perihelion and the Darkside runs pretty constant at -410° F. No permanent installation with a human crew could survive at either extreme. But with Mercury’s wobble, the twilight zone between Brightside and Darkside offers something closer to survival temperatures. Sanderson built the Lab up near the pole, where the zone is about five miles wide, so the temperature only varies 50 to 60 degrees with the libration. The Solar ’scope could take that much change and they’d get good clear observation of the Sun for about seventy out of the eighty-eight days it takes the planet to wheel around. The Major was counting on Sanderson knowing something about Mercury as well as the Sun when we camped at the Lab to make final preparations. Sanderson did. He thought we’d lost our minds and he said so, but he gave us all the help he could. He spent a week briefing Jack Stone, the third member of our party, who had arrived with the supplies and equipment a few days earlier. Poor Jack met us at the rocket landing almost bawling, Sanderson had given him such a gloomy picture of what Brightside was like. Stone was a youngster—hardly twenty-five, I’d say—but he’d been with the Major at Vulcan and had begged to join this trek. I had a funny feeling that Jack really didn’t care for exploring too much, but he thought Mikuta was God, followed him around like a puppy. It didn’t matter to me as long as he knew what he was getting in for. You don’t go asking people in this game why they do it—they’re liable to get awfully uneasy and none of them can ever give you an answer that makes sense. Anyway, Stone had borrowed three men from the Lab, and had the supplies and equipment all lined up when we got there, ready to check and test. We dug right in. With plenty of funds—tri-V money and some government cash the Major had talked his way around—our equipment was new and good. Mikuta had done the designing and testing himself, with a big assist from Sanderson. We had four Bugs, three of them the light pillow-tire models, with special lead-cooled cut-in engines when the heat set in, and one heavy-duty tractor model for pulling the sledges. The Major went over them like a kid at the circus. Then he said, “Have you heard anything from McIvers?” “Who’s he?” Stone wanted to know. “He’ll be joining us. He’s a good man—got quite a name for climbing, back home.” The Major turned to me. “You’ve probably heard of him.” I’d heard plenty of stories about Ted McIvers and I wasn’t too happy to hear that he was joining us. “Kind of a daredevil, isn’t he?” “Maybe. He’s lucky and skillful. Where do you draw the line? We’ll need plenty of both.” “Have you ever worked with him?” I asked. “No. Are you worried?” “Not exactly. But Brightside is no place to count on luck.” The Major laughed. “I don’t think we need to worry about McIvers. We understood each other when I talked up the trip to him and we’re going to need each other too much to do any fooling around.” He turned back to the supply list. “Meanwhile, let’s get this stuff listed and packed. We’ll need to cut weight sharply and our time is short. Sanderson says we should leave in three days.” Two days later, McIvers hadn’t arrived. The Major didn’t say much about it. Stone was getting edgy and so was I. We spent the second day studying charts of the Brightside, such as they were. The best available were pretty poor, taken from so far out that the detail dissolved into blurs on blow-up. They showed the biggest ranges of peaks and craters and faults, and that was all. Still, we could use them to plan a broad outline of our course. “This range here,” the Major said as we crowded around the board, “is largely inactive, according to Sanderson. But these to the south and west could be active. Seismograph tracings suggest a lot of activity in that region, getting worse down toward the equator—not only volcanic, but sub-surface shifting.” Stone nodded. “Sanderson told me there was probably constant surface activity.” The Major shrugged. “Well, it’s treacherous, there’s no doubt of it. But the only way to avoid it is to travel over the Pole, which would lose us days and offer us no guarantee of less activity to the west. Now we might avoid some if we could find a pass through this range and cut sharp east—” It seemed that the more we considered the problem, the further we got from a solution. We knew there were active volcanoes on the Brightside—even on the Darkside, though surface activity there was pretty much slowed down and localized. But there were problems of atmosphere on Brightside, as well. There was an atmosphere and a constant atmospheric flow from Brightside to Darkside. Not much—the lighter gases had reached escape velocity and disappeared from Brightside millennia ago—but there was CO 2 , and nitrogen, and traces of other heavier gases. There was also an abundance of sulfur vapor, as well as carbon disulfide and sulfur dioxide. The atmospheric tide moved toward the Darkside, where it condensed, carrying enough volcanic ash with it for Sanderson to estimate the depth and nature of the surface upheavals on Brightside from his samplings. The trick was to find a passage that avoided those upheavals as far as possible. But in the final analysis, we were barely scraping the surface. The only way we would find out what was happening where was to be there. Finally, on the third day, McIvers blew in on a freight rocket from Venus. He’d missed the ship that the Major and I had taken by a few hours, and had conned his way to Venus in hopes of getting a hop from there. He didn’t seem too upset about it, as though this were his usual way of doing things and he couldn’t see why everyone should get so excited. He was a tall, rangy man with long, wavy hair prematurely gray, and the sort of eyes that looked like a climber’s—half-closed, sleepy, almost indolent, but capable of abrupt alertness. And he never stood still; he was always moving, always doing something with his hands, or talking, or pacing about. Evidently the Major decided not to press the issue of his arrival. There was still work to do, and an hour later we were running the final tests on the pressure suits. That evening, Stone and McIvers were thick as thieves, and everything was set for an early departure after we got some rest. “And that,” said Baron, finishing his drink and signaling the waiter for another pair, “was your first big mistake.” Peter Claney raised his eyebrows. “McIvers?” “Of course.” Claney shrugged, glanced at the small quiet tables around them. “There are lots of bizarre personalities around a place like this, and some of the best wouldn’t seem to be the most reliable at first glance. Anyway, personality problems weren’t our big problem right then. Equipment worried us first and route next.” Baron nodded in agreement. “What kind of suits did you have?” “The best insulating suits ever made,” said Claney. “Each one had an inner lining of a fiberglass modification, to avoid the clumsiness of asbestos, and carried the refrigerating unit and oxygen storage which we recharged from the sledges every eight hours. Outer layer carried a monomolecular chrome reflecting surface that made us glitter like Christmas trees. And we had a half-inch dead-air space under positive pressure between the two layers. Warning thermocouples, of course—at 770 degrees, it wouldn’t take much time to fry us to cinders if the suits failed somewhere.” “How about the Bugs?” “They were insulated, too, but we weren’t counting on them too much for protection.” “You weren’t!” Baron exclaimed. “Why not?” “We’d be in and out of them too much. They gave us mobility and storage, but we knew we’d have to do a lot of forward work on foot.” Claney smiled bitterly. “Which meant that we had an inch of fiberglass and a half-inch of dead air between us and a surface temperature where lead flowed like water and zinc was almost at melting point and the pools of sulfur in the shadows were boiling like oatmeal over a campfire.” Baron licked his lips. His fingers stroked the cool, wet glass as he set it down on the tablecloth. “Go on,” he said tautly. “You started on schedule?” “Oh, yes,” said Claney, “we started on schedule, all right. We just didn’t quite end on schedule, that was all. But I’m getting to that.” He settled back in his chair and continued. We jumped off from Twilight on a course due southeast with thirty days to make it to the Center of Brightside. If we could cross an average of seventy miles a day, we could hit Center exactly at perihelion, the point of Mercury’s closest approach to the Sun—which made Center the hottest part of the planet at the hottest it ever gets. The Sun was already huge and yellow over the horizon when we started, twice the size it appears on Earth. Every day that Sun would grow bigger and whiter, and every day the surface would get hotter. But once we reached Center, the job was only half done—we would still have to travel another two thousand miles to the opposite twilight zone. Sanderson was to meet us on the other side in the Laboratory’s scout ship, approximately sixty days from the time we jumped off. That was the plan, in outline. It was up to us to cross those seventy miles a day, no matter how hot it became, no matter what terrain we had to cross. Detours would be dangerous and time-consuming. Delays could cost us our lives. We all knew that. The Major briefed us on details an hour before we left. “Peter, you’ll take the lead Bug, the small one we stripped down for you. Stone and I will flank you on either side, giving you a hundred-yard lead. McIvers, you’ll have the job of dragging the sledges, so we’ll have to direct your course pretty closely. Peter’s job is to pick the passage at any given point. If there’s any doubt of safe passage, we’ll all explore ahead on foot before we risk the Bugs. Got that?” McIvers and Stone exchanged glances. McIvers said: “Jack and I were planning to change around. We figured he could take the sledges. That would give me a little more mobility.” The Major looked up sharply at Stone. “Do you buy that, Jack?” Stone shrugged. “I don’t mind. Mac wanted—” McIvers made an impatient gesture with his hands. “It doesn’t matter. I just feel better when I’m on the move. Does it make any difference?” “I guess it doesn’t,” said the Major. “Then you’ll flank Peter along with me. Right?” “Sure, sure.” McIvers pulled at his lower lip. “Who’s going to do the advance scouting?” “It sounds like I am,” I cut in. “We want to keep the lead Bug light as possible.” Mikuta nodded. “That’s right. Peter’s Bug is stripped down to the frame and wheels.” McIvers shook his head. “No, I mean the advance work. You need somebody out ahead—four or five miles, at least—to pick up the big flaws and active surface changes, don’t you?” He stared at the Major. “I mean, how can we tell what sort of a hole we may be moving into, unless we have a scout up ahead?” “That’s what we have the charts for,” the Major said sharply. “Charts! I’m talking about detail work. We don’t need to worry about the major topography. It’s the little faults you can’t see on the pictures that can kill us.” He tossed the charts down excitedly. “Look, let me take a Bug out ahead and work reconnaissance, keep five, maybe ten miles ahead of the column. I can stay on good solid ground, of course, but scan the area closely and radio back to Peter where to avoid the flaws. Then—” “No dice,” the Major broke in. “But why not? We could save ourselves days!” “I don’t care what we could save. We stay together. When we get to the Center, I want live men along with me. That means we stay within easy sight of each other at all times. Any climber knows that everybody is safer in a party than one man alone—any time, any place.” McIvers stared at him, his cheeks an angry red. Finally he gave a sullen nod. “Okay. If you say so.” “Well, I say so and I mean it. I don’t want any fancy stuff. We’re going to hit Center together, and finish the Crossing together. Got that?” McIvers nodded. Mikuta then looked at Stone and me and we nodded, too. “All right,” he said slowly. “Now that we’ve got it straight, let’s go.” It was hot. If I forget everything else about that trek, I’ll never forget that huge yellow Sun glaring down, without a break, hotter and hotter with every mile. We knew that the first few days would be the easiest and we were rested and fresh when we started down the long ragged gorge southeast of the Twilight Lab. I moved out first; back over my shoulder, I could see the Major and McIvers crawling out behind me, their pillow tires taking the rugged floor of the gorge smoothly. Behind them, Stone dragged the sledges. Even at only 30 per cent Earth gravity they were a strain on the big tractor, until the ski-blades bit into the fluffy volcanic ash blanketing the valley. We even had a path to follow for the first twenty miles. I kept my eyes pasted to the big polaroid binocs, picking out the track the early research teams had made out into the edge of Brightside. But in a couple of hours we rumbled past Sanderson’s little outpost observatory and the tracks stopped. We were in virgin territory and already the Sun was beginning to bite. We didn’t feel the heat so much those first days out. We saw it. The refrig units kept our skins at a nice comfortable seventy-five degrees Fahrenheit inside our suits, but our eyes watched that glaring Sun and the baked yellow rocks going past, and some nerve pathways got twisted up, somehow. We poured sweat as if we were in a superheated furnace. We drove eight hours and slept five. When a sleep period came due, we pulled the Bugs together into a square, threw up a light aluminum sun-shield and lay out in the dust and rocks. The sun-shield cut the temperature down sixty or seventy degrees, for whatever help that was. And then we ate from the forward sledge—sucking through tubes—protein, carbohydrates, bulk gelatin, vitamins. The Major measured water out with an iron hand, because we’d have drunk ourselves into nephritis in a week otherwise. We were constantly, unceasingly thirsty. Ask the physiologists and psychiatrists why—they can give you have a dozen interesting reasons—but all we knew, or cared about, was that it happened to be so. We didn’t sleep the first few stops, as a consequence. Our eyes burned in spite of the filters and we had roaring headaches, but we couldn’t sleep them off. We sat around looking at each other. Then McIvers would say how good a beer would taste, and off we’d go. We’d have murdered our grandmothers for one ice-cold bottle of beer. After a few driving periods, I began to get my bearings at the wheel. We were moving down into desolation that made Earth’s old Death Valley look like a Japanese rose garden. Huge sun-baked cracks opened up in the floor of the gorge, with black cliffs jutting up on either side; the air was filled with a barely visible yellowish mist of sulfur and sulfurous gases. It was a hot, barren hole, no place for any man to go, but the challenge was so powerful you could almost feel it. No one had ever crossed this land before and escaped. Those who had tried it had been cruelly punished, but the land was still there, so it had to be crossed. Not the easy way. It had to be crossed the hardest way possible: overland, through anything the land could throw up to us, at the most difficult time possible. Yet we knew that even the land might have been conquered before, except for that Sun. We’d fought absolute cold before and won. We’d never fought heat like this and won. The only worse heat in the Solar System was the surface of the Sun itself. Brightside was worth trying for. We would get it or it would get us. That was the bargain. I learned a lot about Mercury those first few driving periods. The gorge petered out after a hundred miles and we moved onto the slope of a range of ragged craters that ran south and east. This range had shown no activity since the first landing on Mercury forty years before, but beyond it there were active cones. Yellow fumes rose from the craters constantly; their sides were shrouded with heavy ash. We couldn’t detect a wind, but we knew there was a hot, sulfurous breeze sweeping in great continental tides across the face of the planet. Not enough for erosion, though. The craters rose up out of jagged gorges, huge towering spears of rock and rubble. Below were the vast yellow flatlands, smoking and hissing from the gases beneath the crust. Over everything was gray dust—silicates and salts, pumice and limestone and granite ash, filling crevices and declivities—offering a soft, treacherous surface for the Bug’s pillow tires. I learned to read the ground, to tell a covered fault by the sag of the dust; I learned to spot a passable crack, and tell it from an impassable cut. Time after time the Bugs ground to a halt while we explored a passage on foot, tied together with light copper cable, digging, advancing, digging some more until we were sure the surface would carry the machines. It was cruel work; we slept in exhaustion. But it went smoothly, at first. Too smoothly, it seemed to me, and the others seemed to think so, too. McIvers’ restlessness was beginning to grate on our nerves. He talked too much, while we were resting or while we were driving; wisecracks, witticisms, unfunny jokes that wore thin with repetition. He took to making side trips from the route now and then, never far, but a little further each time. Jack Stone reacted quite the opposite; he grew quieter with each stop, more reserved and apprehensive. I didn’t like it, but I figured that it would pass off after a while. I was apprehensive enough myself; I just managed to hide it better. And every mile the Sun got bigger and whiter and higher in the sky and hotter. Without our ultra-violet screens and glare filters we would have been blinded; as it was our eyes ached constantly and the skin on our faces itched and tingled at the end of an eight-hour trek. But it took one of those side trips of McIvers’ to deliver the penultimate blow to our already fraying nerves. He had driven down a side-branch of a long canyon running off west of our route and was almost out of sight in a cloud of ash when we heard a sharp cry through our earphones. I wheeled my Bug around with my heart in my throat and spotted him through the binocs, waving frantically from the top of his machine. The Major and I took off, lumbering down the gulch after him as fast as the Bugs could go, with a thousand horrible pictures racing through our minds.... We found him standing stock-still, pointing down the gorge and, for once, he didn’t have anything to say. It was the wreck of a Bug; an old-fashioned half-track model of the sort that hadn’t been in use for years. It was wedged tight in a cut in the rock, an axle broken, its casing split wide open up the middle, half-buried in a rock slide. A dozen feet away were two insulated suits with white bones gleaming through the fiberglass helmets. This was as far as Wyatt and Carpenter had gotten on their Brightside Crossing. On the fifth driving period out, the terrain began to change. It looked the same, but every now and then it felt different. On two occasions I felt my wheels spin, with a howl of protest from my engine. Then, quite suddenly, the Bug gave a lurch; I gunned my motor and nothing happened. I could see the dull gray stuff seeping up around the hubs, thick and tenacious, splattering around in steaming gobs as the wheels spun. I knew what had happened the moment the wheels gave and, a few minutes later, they chained me to the tractor and dragged me back out of the mire. It looked for all the world like thick gray mud, but it was a pit of molten lead, steaming under a soft layer of concealing ash. I picked my way more cautiously then. We were getting into an area of recent surface activity; the surface was really treacherous. I caught myself wishing that the Major had okayed McIvers’ scheme for an advanced scout; more dangerous for the individual, maybe, but I was driving blind now and I didn’t like it. One error in judgment could sink us all, but I wasn’t thinking much about the others. I was worried about me , plenty worried. I kept thinking, better McIvers should go than me. It wasn’t healthy thinking and I knew it, but I couldn’t get the thought out of my mind. It was a grueling eight hours and we slept poorly. Back in the Bug again, we moved still more slowly—edging out on a broad flat plateau, dodging a network of gaping surface cracks—winding back and forth in an effort to keep the machines on solid rock. I couldn’t see far ahead, because of the yellow haze rising from the cracks, so I was almost on top of it when I saw a sharp cut ahead where the surface dropped six feet beyond a deep crack. I let out a shout to halt the others; then I edged my Bug forward, peering at the cleft. It was deep and wide. I moved fifty yards to the left, then back to the right. There was only one place that looked like a possible crossing; a long, narrow ledge of gray stuff that lay down across a section of the fault like a ramp. Even as I watched it, I could feel the surface crust under the Bug trembling and saw the ledge shift over a few feet.

Who is Jack Stone, and what happens to him throughout the story?

9

Jack Stone is a young man of about twenty-five who is part of the Brightside Crossing team. He had worked with Major Makuta at Vulcan and pleaded with him to be part of the Brightside mission. Claney theorizes that he doesn’t care as much about exploring as he does Mikuta, who he sees as a kind of god and follows around. He arrives to Twilight Lab a few days before Claney and Mikuta to be briefed by Sanderson, and brings the supplies and equipment for the mission with him. By the time the other two arrive, Jack seems somewhat despondent based on what Sanderson has told him about the difficulties and improbability of the mission. Jack is assigned to flank Peter on the mission, along with Mikuta, but agrees to switch positions with McIvers and pull the sledges instead. This seems like something McIvers had pushed for in a previous conversation, but Jack says he doesn’t mind and Mikuta agrees to the switch. As the mission goes on, Claney notices that, unlike McIvers, Jack gets quieter and more reserved as he grows more apprehensive.

49165

Brightside Crossing by Alan E. Nourse JAMES BARON was not pleased to hear that he had had a visitor when he reached the Red Lion that evening. He had no stomach for mysteries, vast or trifling, and there were pressing things to think about at this time. Yet the doorman had flagged him as he came in from the street: “A thousand pardons, Mr. Baron. The gentleman—he would leave no name. He said you’d want to see him. He will be back by eight.” Now Baron drummed his fingers on the table top, staring about the quiet lounge. Street trade was discouraged at the Red Lion, gently but persuasively; the patrons were few in number. Across to the right was a group that Baron knew vaguely—Andean climbers, or at least two of them were. Over near the door he recognized old Balmer, who had mapped the first passage to the core of Vulcan Crater on Venus. Baron returned his smile with a nod. Then he settled back and waited impatiently for the intruder who demanded his time without justifying it. Presently a small, grizzled man crossed the room and sat down at Baron’s table. He was short and wiry. His face held no key to his age—he might have been thirty or a thousand—but he looked weary and immensely ugly. His cheeks and forehead were twisted and brown, with scars that were still healing. The stranger said, “I’m glad you waited. I’ve heard you’re planning to attempt the Brightside.” Baron stared at the man for a moment. “I see you can read telecasts,” he said coldly. “The news was correct. We are going to make a Brightside Crossing.” “At perihelion?” “Of course. When else?” The grizzled man searched Baron’s face for a moment without expression. Then he said slowly, “No, I’m afraid you’re not going to make the Crossing.” “Say, who are you, if you don’t mind?” Baron demanded. “The name is Claney,” said the stranger. There was a silence. Then: “Claney? Peter Claney?” “That’s right.” Baron’s eyes were wide with excitement, all trace of anger gone. “Great balls of fire, man— where have you been hiding? We’ve been trying to contact you for months!” “I know. I was hoping you’d quit looking and chuck the whole idea.” “Quit looking!” Baron bent forward over the table. “My friend, we’d given up hope, but we’ve never quit looking. Here, have a drink. There’s so much you can tell us.” His fingers were trembling. Peter Claney shook his head. “I can’t tell you anything you want to hear.” “But you’ve got to. You’re the only man on Earth who’s attempted a Brightside Crossing and lived through it! And the story you cleared for the news—it was nothing. We need details . Where did your equipment fall down? Where did you miscalculate? What were the trouble spots?” Baron jabbed a finger at Claney’s face. “That, for instance—epithelioma? Why? What was wrong with your glass? Your filters? We’ve got to know those things. If you can tell us, we can make it across where your attempt failed—” “You want to know why we failed?” asked Claney. “Of course we want to know. We have to know.” “It’s simple. We failed because it can’t be done. We couldn’t do it and neither can you. No human beings will ever cross the Brightside alive, not if they try for centuries.” “Nonsense,” Baron declared. “We will.” Claney shrugged. “I was there. I know what I’m saying. You can blame the equipment or the men—there were flaws in both quarters—but we just didn’t know what we were fighting. It was the planet that whipped us, that and the Sun . They’ll whip you, too, if you try it.” “Never,” said Baron. “Let me tell you,” Peter Claney said. I’d been interested in the Brightside for almost as long as I can remember (Claney said). I guess I was about ten when Wyatt and Carpenter made the last attempt—that was in 2082, I think. I followed the news stories like a tri-V serial and then I was heartbroken when they just disappeared. I know now that they were a pair of idiots, starting off without proper equipment, with practically no knowledge of surface conditions, without any charts—they couldn’t have made a hundred miles—but I didn’t know that then and it was a terrible tragedy. After that, I followed Sanderson’s work in the Twilight Lab up there and began to get Brightside into my blood, sure as death. But it was Mikuta’s idea to attempt a Crossing. Did you ever know Tom Mikuta? I don’t suppose you did. No, not Japanese—Polish-American. He was a major in the Interplanetary Service for some years and hung onto the title after he gave up his commission. He was with Armstrong on Mars during his Service days, did a good deal of the original mapping and surveying for the Colony there. I first met him on Venus; we spent five years together up there doing some of the nastiest exploring since the Matto Grasso. Then he made the attempt on Vulcan Crater that paved the way for Balmer a few years later. I’d always liked the Major—he was big and quiet and cool, the sort of guy who always had things figured a little further ahead than anyone else and always knew what to do in a tight place. Too many men in this game are all nerve and luck, with no judgment. The Major had both. He also had the kind of personality that could take a crew of wild men and make them work like a well-oiled machine across a thousand miles of Venus jungle. I liked him and I trusted him. He contacted me in New York and he was very casual at first. We spent an evening here at the Red Lion, talking about old times; he told me about the Vulcan business, and how he’d been out to see Sanderson and the Twilight Lab on Mercury, and how he preferred a hot trek to a cold one any day of the year—and then he wanted to know what I’d been doing since Venus and what my plans were. “No particular plans,” I told him. “Why?” He looked me over. “How much do you weigh, Peter?” I told him one-thirty-five. “That much!” he said. “Well, there can’t be much fat on you, at any rate. How do you take heat?” “You should know,” I said. “Venus was no icebox.” “No, I mean real heat.” Then I began to get it. “You’re planning a trip.” “That’s right. A hot trip.” He grinned at me. “Might be dangerous, too.” “What trip?” “Brightside of Mercury,” the Major said. I whistled cautiously. “At aphelion?” He threw his head back. “Why try a Crossing at aphelion? What have you done then? Four thousand miles of butcherous heat, just to have some joker come along, use your data and drum you out of the glory by crossing at perihelion forty-four days later? No, thanks. I want the Brightside without any nonsense about it.” He leaned across me eagerly. “I want to make a Crossing at perihelion and I want to cross on the surface. If a man can do that, he’s got Mercury. Until then, nobody’s got Mercury. I want Mercury—but I’ll need help getting it.” I’d thought of it a thousand times and never dared consider it. Nobody had, since Wyatt and Carpenter disappeared. Mercury turns on its axis in the same time that it wheels around the Sun, which means that the Brightside is always facing in. That makes the Brightside of Mercury at perihelion the hottest place in the Solar System, with one single exception: the surface of the Sun itself. It would be a hellish trek. Only a few men had ever learned just how hellish and they never came back to tell about it. It was a real hell’s Crossing, but someday, I thought, somebody would cross it. I wanted to be along. The Twilight Lab, near the northern pole of Mercury, was the obvious jumping-off place. The setup there wasn’t very extensive—a rocket landing, the labs and quarters for Sanderson’s crew sunk deep into the crust, and the tower that housed the Solar ’scope that Sanderson had built up there ten years before. Twilight Lab wasn’t particularly interested in the Brightside, of course—the Sun was Sanderson’s baby and he’d picked Mercury as the closest chunk of rock to the Sun that could hold his observatory. He’d chosen a good location, too. On Mercury, the Brightside temperature hits 770° F. at perihelion and the Darkside runs pretty constant at -410° F. No permanent installation with a human crew could survive at either extreme. But with Mercury’s wobble, the twilight zone between Brightside and Darkside offers something closer to survival temperatures. Sanderson built the Lab up near the pole, where the zone is about five miles wide, so the temperature only varies 50 to 60 degrees with the libration. The Solar ’scope could take that much change and they’d get good clear observation of the Sun for about seventy out of the eighty-eight days it takes the planet to wheel around. The Major was counting on Sanderson knowing something about Mercury as well as the Sun when we camped at the Lab to make final preparations. Sanderson did. He thought we’d lost our minds and he said so, but he gave us all the help he could. He spent a week briefing Jack Stone, the third member of our party, who had arrived with the supplies and equipment a few days earlier. Poor Jack met us at the rocket landing almost bawling, Sanderson had given him such a gloomy picture of what Brightside was like. Stone was a youngster—hardly twenty-five, I’d say—but he’d been with the Major at Vulcan and had begged to join this trek. I had a funny feeling that Jack really didn’t care for exploring too much, but he thought Mikuta was God, followed him around like a puppy. It didn’t matter to me as long as he knew what he was getting in for. You don’t go asking people in this game why they do it—they’re liable to get awfully uneasy and none of them can ever give you an answer that makes sense. Anyway, Stone had borrowed three men from the Lab, and had the supplies and equipment all lined up when we got there, ready to check and test. We dug right in. With plenty of funds—tri-V money and some government cash the Major had talked his way around—our equipment was new and good. Mikuta had done the designing and testing himself, with a big assist from Sanderson. We had four Bugs, three of them the light pillow-tire models, with special lead-cooled cut-in engines when the heat set in, and one heavy-duty tractor model for pulling the sledges. The Major went over them like a kid at the circus. Then he said, “Have you heard anything from McIvers?” “Who’s he?” Stone wanted to know. “He’ll be joining us. He’s a good man—got quite a name for climbing, back home.” The Major turned to me. “You’ve probably heard of him.” I’d heard plenty of stories about Ted McIvers and I wasn’t too happy to hear that he was joining us. “Kind of a daredevil, isn’t he?” “Maybe. He’s lucky and skillful. Where do you draw the line? We’ll need plenty of both.” “Have you ever worked with him?” I asked. “No. Are you worried?” “Not exactly. But Brightside is no place to count on luck.” The Major laughed. “I don’t think we need to worry about McIvers. We understood each other when I talked up the trip to him and we’re going to need each other too much to do any fooling around.” He turned back to the supply list. “Meanwhile, let’s get this stuff listed and packed. We’ll need to cut weight sharply and our time is short. Sanderson says we should leave in three days.” Two days later, McIvers hadn’t arrived. The Major didn’t say much about it. Stone was getting edgy and so was I. We spent the second day studying charts of the Brightside, such as they were. The best available were pretty poor, taken from so far out that the detail dissolved into blurs on blow-up. They showed the biggest ranges of peaks and craters and faults, and that was all. Still, we could use them to plan a broad outline of our course. “This range here,” the Major said as we crowded around the board, “is largely inactive, according to Sanderson. But these to the south and west could be active. Seismograph tracings suggest a lot of activity in that region, getting worse down toward the equator—not only volcanic, but sub-surface shifting.” Stone nodded. “Sanderson told me there was probably constant surface activity.” The Major shrugged. “Well, it’s treacherous, there’s no doubt of it. But the only way to avoid it is to travel over the Pole, which would lose us days and offer us no guarantee of less activity to the west. Now we might avoid some if we could find a pass through this range and cut sharp east—” It seemed that the more we considered the problem, the further we got from a solution. We knew there were active volcanoes on the Brightside—even on the Darkside, though surface activity there was pretty much slowed down and localized. But there were problems of atmosphere on Brightside, as well. There was an atmosphere and a constant atmospheric flow from Brightside to Darkside. Not much—the lighter gases had reached escape velocity and disappeared from Brightside millennia ago—but there was CO 2 , and nitrogen, and traces of other heavier gases. There was also an abundance of sulfur vapor, as well as carbon disulfide and sulfur dioxide. The atmospheric tide moved toward the Darkside, where it condensed, carrying enough volcanic ash with it for Sanderson to estimate the depth and nature of the surface upheavals on Brightside from his samplings. The trick was to find a passage that avoided those upheavals as far as possible. But in the final analysis, we were barely scraping the surface. The only way we would find out what was happening where was to be there. Finally, on the third day, McIvers blew in on a freight rocket from Venus. He’d missed the ship that the Major and I had taken by a few hours, and had conned his way to Venus in hopes of getting a hop from there. He didn’t seem too upset about it, as though this were his usual way of doing things and he couldn’t see why everyone should get so excited. He was a tall, rangy man with long, wavy hair prematurely gray, and the sort of eyes that looked like a climber’s—half-closed, sleepy, almost indolent, but capable of abrupt alertness. And he never stood still; he was always moving, always doing something with his hands, or talking, or pacing about. Evidently the Major decided not to press the issue of his arrival. There was still work to do, and an hour later we were running the final tests on the pressure suits. That evening, Stone and McIvers were thick as thieves, and everything was set for an early departure after we got some rest. “And that,” said Baron, finishing his drink and signaling the waiter for another pair, “was your first big mistake.” Peter Claney raised his eyebrows. “McIvers?” “Of course.” Claney shrugged, glanced at the small quiet tables around them. “There are lots of bizarre personalities around a place like this, and some of the best wouldn’t seem to be the most reliable at first glance. Anyway, personality problems weren’t our big problem right then. Equipment worried us first and route next.” Baron nodded in agreement. “What kind of suits did you have?” “The best insulating suits ever made,” said Claney. “Each one had an inner lining of a fiberglass modification, to avoid the clumsiness of asbestos, and carried the refrigerating unit and oxygen storage which we recharged from the sledges every eight hours. Outer layer carried a monomolecular chrome reflecting surface that made us glitter like Christmas trees. And we had a half-inch dead-air space under positive pressure between the two layers. Warning thermocouples, of course—at 770 degrees, it wouldn’t take much time to fry us to cinders if the suits failed somewhere.” “How about the Bugs?” “They were insulated, too, but we weren’t counting on them too much for protection.” “You weren’t!” Baron exclaimed. “Why not?” “We’d be in and out of them too much. They gave us mobility and storage, but we knew we’d have to do a lot of forward work on foot.” Claney smiled bitterly. “Which meant that we had an inch of fiberglass and a half-inch of dead air between us and a surface temperature where lead flowed like water and zinc was almost at melting point and the pools of sulfur in the shadows were boiling like oatmeal over a campfire.” Baron licked his lips. His fingers stroked the cool, wet glass as he set it down on the tablecloth. “Go on,” he said tautly. “You started on schedule?” “Oh, yes,” said Claney, “we started on schedule, all right. We just didn’t quite end on schedule, that was all. But I’m getting to that.” He settled back in his chair and continued. We jumped off from Twilight on a course due southeast with thirty days to make it to the Center of Brightside. If we could cross an average of seventy miles a day, we could hit Center exactly at perihelion, the point of Mercury’s closest approach to the Sun—which made Center the hottest part of the planet at the hottest it ever gets. The Sun was already huge and yellow over the horizon when we started, twice the size it appears on Earth. Every day that Sun would grow bigger and whiter, and every day the surface would get hotter. But once we reached Center, the job was only half done—we would still have to travel another two thousand miles to the opposite twilight zone. Sanderson was to meet us on the other side in the Laboratory’s scout ship, approximately sixty days from the time we jumped off. That was the plan, in outline. It was up to us to cross those seventy miles a day, no matter how hot it became, no matter what terrain we had to cross. Detours would be dangerous and time-consuming. Delays could cost us our lives. We all knew that. The Major briefed us on details an hour before we left. “Peter, you’ll take the lead Bug, the small one we stripped down for you. Stone and I will flank you on either side, giving you a hundred-yard lead. McIvers, you’ll have the job of dragging the sledges, so we’ll have to direct your course pretty closely. Peter’s job is to pick the passage at any given point. If there’s any doubt of safe passage, we’ll all explore ahead on foot before we risk the Bugs. Got that?” McIvers and Stone exchanged glances. McIvers said: “Jack and I were planning to change around. We figured he could take the sledges. That would give me a little more mobility.” The Major looked up sharply at Stone. “Do you buy that, Jack?” Stone shrugged. “I don’t mind. Mac wanted—” McIvers made an impatient gesture with his hands. “It doesn’t matter. I just feel better when I’m on the move. Does it make any difference?” “I guess it doesn’t,” said the Major. “Then you’ll flank Peter along with me. Right?” “Sure, sure.” McIvers pulled at his lower lip. “Who’s going to do the advance scouting?” “It sounds like I am,” I cut in. “We want to keep the lead Bug light as possible.” Mikuta nodded. “That’s right. Peter’s Bug is stripped down to the frame and wheels.” McIvers shook his head. “No, I mean the advance work. You need somebody out ahead—four or five miles, at least—to pick up the big flaws and active surface changes, don’t you?” He stared at the Major. “I mean, how can we tell what sort of a hole we may be moving into, unless we have a scout up ahead?” “That’s what we have the charts for,” the Major said sharply. “Charts! I’m talking about detail work. We don’t need to worry about the major topography. It’s the little faults you can’t see on the pictures that can kill us.” He tossed the charts down excitedly. “Look, let me take a Bug out ahead and work reconnaissance, keep five, maybe ten miles ahead of the column. I can stay on good solid ground, of course, but scan the area closely and radio back to Peter where to avoid the flaws. Then—” “No dice,” the Major broke in. “But why not? We could save ourselves days!” “I don’t care what we could save. We stay together. When we get to the Center, I want live men along with me. That means we stay within easy sight of each other at all times. Any climber knows that everybody is safer in a party than one man alone—any time, any place.” McIvers stared at him, his cheeks an angry red. Finally he gave a sullen nod. “Okay. If you say so.” “Well, I say so and I mean it. I don’t want any fancy stuff. We’re going to hit Center together, and finish the Crossing together. Got that?” McIvers nodded. Mikuta then looked at Stone and me and we nodded, too. “All right,” he said slowly. “Now that we’ve got it straight, let’s go.” It was hot. If I forget everything else about that trek, I’ll never forget that huge yellow Sun glaring down, without a break, hotter and hotter with every mile. We knew that the first few days would be the easiest and we were rested and fresh when we started down the long ragged gorge southeast of the Twilight Lab. I moved out first; back over my shoulder, I could see the Major and McIvers crawling out behind me, their pillow tires taking the rugged floor of the gorge smoothly. Behind them, Stone dragged the sledges. Even at only 30 per cent Earth gravity they were a strain on the big tractor, until the ski-blades bit into the fluffy volcanic ash blanketing the valley. We even had a path to follow for the first twenty miles. I kept my eyes pasted to the big polaroid binocs, picking out the track the early research teams had made out into the edge of Brightside. But in a couple of hours we rumbled past Sanderson’s little outpost observatory and the tracks stopped. We were in virgin territory and already the Sun was beginning to bite. We didn’t feel the heat so much those first days out. We saw it. The refrig units kept our skins at a nice comfortable seventy-five degrees Fahrenheit inside our suits, but our eyes watched that glaring Sun and the baked yellow rocks going past, and some nerve pathways got twisted up, somehow. We poured sweat as if we were in a superheated furnace. We drove eight hours and slept five. When a sleep period came due, we pulled the Bugs together into a square, threw up a light aluminum sun-shield and lay out in the dust and rocks. The sun-shield cut the temperature down sixty or seventy degrees, for whatever help that was. And then we ate from the forward sledge—sucking through tubes—protein, carbohydrates, bulk gelatin, vitamins. The Major measured water out with an iron hand, because we’d have drunk ourselves into nephritis in a week otherwise. We were constantly, unceasingly thirsty. Ask the physiologists and psychiatrists why—they can give you have a dozen interesting reasons—but all we knew, or cared about, was that it happened to be so. We didn’t sleep the first few stops, as a consequence. Our eyes burned in spite of the filters and we had roaring headaches, but we couldn’t sleep them off. We sat around looking at each other. Then McIvers would say how good a beer would taste, and off we’d go. We’d have murdered our grandmothers for one ice-cold bottle of beer. After a few driving periods, I began to get my bearings at the wheel. We were moving down into desolation that made Earth’s old Death Valley look like a Japanese rose garden. Huge sun-baked cracks opened up in the floor of the gorge, with black cliffs jutting up on either side; the air was filled with a barely visible yellowish mist of sulfur and sulfurous gases. It was a hot, barren hole, no place for any man to go, but the challenge was so powerful you could almost feel it. No one had ever crossed this land before and escaped. Those who had tried it had been cruelly punished, but the land was still there, so it had to be crossed. Not the easy way. It had to be crossed the hardest way possible: overland, through anything the land could throw up to us, at the most difficult time possible. Yet we knew that even the land might have been conquered before, except for that Sun. We’d fought absolute cold before and won. We’d never fought heat like this and won. The only worse heat in the Solar System was the surface of the Sun itself. Brightside was worth trying for. We would get it or it would get us. That was the bargain. I learned a lot about Mercury those first few driving periods. The gorge petered out after a hundred miles and we moved onto the slope of a range of ragged craters that ran south and east. This range had shown no activity since the first landing on Mercury forty years before, but beyond it there were active cones. Yellow fumes rose from the craters constantly; their sides were shrouded with heavy ash. We couldn’t detect a wind, but we knew there was a hot, sulfurous breeze sweeping in great continental tides across the face of the planet. Not enough for erosion, though. The craters rose up out of jagged gorges, huge towering spears of rock and rubble. Below were the vast yellow flatlands, smoking and hissing from the gases beneath the crust. Over everything was gray dust—silicates and salts, pumice and limestone and granite ash, filling crevices and declivities—offering a soft, treacherous surface for the Bug’s pillow tires. I learned to read the ground, to tell a covered fault by the sag of the dust; I learned to spot a passable crack, and tell it from an impassable cut. Time after time the Bugs ground to a halt while we explored a passage on foot, tied together with light copper cable, digging, advancing, digging some more until we were sure the surface would carry the machines. It was cruel work; we slept in exhaustion. But it went smoothly, at first. Too smoothly, it seemed to me, and the others seemed to think so, too. McIvers’ restlessness was beginning to grate on our nerves. He talked too much, while we were resting or while we were driving; wisecracks, witticisms, unfunny jokes that wore thin with repetition. He took to making side trips from the route now and then, never far, but a little further each time. Jack Stone reacted quite the opposite; he grew quieter with each stop, more reserved and apprehensive. I didn’t like it, but I figured that it would pass off after a while. I was apprehensive enough myself; I just managed to hide it better. And every mile the Sun got bigger and whiter and higher in the sky and hotter. Without our ultra-violet screens and glare filters we would have been blinded; as it was our eyes ached constantly and the skin on our faces itched and tingled at the end of an eight-hour trek. But it took one of those side trips of McIvers’ to deliver the penultimate blow to our already fraying nerves. He had driven down a side-branch of a long canyon running off west of our route and was almost out of sight in a cloud of ash when we heard a sharp cry through our earphones. I wheeled my Bug around with my heart in my throat and spotted him through the binocs, waving frantically from the top of his machine. The Major and I took off, lumbering down the gulch after him as fast as the Bugs could go, with a thousand horrible pictures racing through our minds.... We found him standing stock-still, pointing down the gorge and, for once, he didn’t have anything to say. It was the wreck of a Bug; an old-fashioned half-track model of the sort that hadn’t been in use for years. It was wedged tight in a cut in the rock, an axle broken, its casing split wide open up the middle, half-buried in a rock slide. A dozen feet away were two insulated suits with white bones gleaming through the fiberglass helmets. This was as far as Wyatt and Carpenter had gotten on their Brightside Crossing. On the fifth driving period out, the terrain began to change. It looked the same, but every now and then it felt different. On two occasions I felt my wheels spin, with a howl of protest from my engine. Then, quite suddenly, the Bug gave a lurch; I gunned my motor and nothing happened. I could see the dull gray stuff seeping up around the hubs, thick and tenacious, splattering around in steaming gobs as the wheels spun. I knew what had happened the moment the wheels gave and, a few minutes later, they chained me to the tractor and dragged me back out of the mire. It looked for all the world like thick gray mud, but it was a pit of molten lead, steaming under a soft layer of concealing ash. I picked my way more cautiously then. We were getting into an area of recent surface activity; the surface was really treacherous. I caught myself wishing that the Major had okayed McIvers’ scheme for an advanced scout; more dangerous for the individual, maybe, but I was driving blind now and I didn’t like it. One error in judgment could sink us all, but I wasn’t thinking much about the others. I was worried about me , plenty worried. I kept thinking, better McIvers should go than me. It wasn’t healthy thinking and I knew it, but I couldn’t get the thought out of my mind. It was a grueling eight hours and we slept poorly. Back in the Bug again, we moved still more slowly—edging out on a broad flat plateau, dodging a network of gaping surface cracks—winding back and forth in an effort to keep the machines on solid rock. I couldn’t see far ahead, because of the yellow haze rising from the cracks, so I was almost on top of it when I saw a sharp cut ahead where the surface dropped six feet beyond a deep crack. I let out a shout to halt the others; then I edged my Bug forward, peering at the cleft. It was deep and wide. I moved fifty yards to the left, then back to the right. There was only one place that looked like a possible crossing; a long, narrow ledge of gray stuff that lay down across a section of the fault like a ramp. Even as I watched it, I could feel the surface crust under the Bug trembling and saw the ledge shift over a few feet.

Who is Jack Stone, and what happens to him throughout the story?

1

Jack Stone is the youngest member of The Brightside Crossing team. He is about 25 years old, and he looks to Major Tom Mikuta as a mentor. They worked together on Venus, and that’s where he discovered that Major would be making the trip across The Brightside. Stone begged Major to let him go along, even though it appears that he’s very nervous about the trip. When Sanderson, The Twilight Lab manager, tells Stone about what The Brightside is really like, Stone nearly cries from fear. He gets the equipment all ready and helps to prepare the team for the treacherous trip. Stone has never met McIvers before, but the two become fast friends. McIvers is able to easily manipulate Stone into switching roles with him. He wants to be more mobile, so he tells Stone that he should drag the sledges instead. Stone acquiesces without a fight. Throughout the trip, Stone becomes quiet and stoic. He is a young guy and isn’t prepared to die on this trip. He responds to the difficult terrain and uncertainties with silence.

63442

Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net DOUBLE TROUBLE by CARL JACOBI Grannie Annie, that waspish science-fiction writer, was in a jam again. What with red-spot fever, talking cockatoos and flagpole trees, I was running in circles—especially since Grannie became twins every now and then. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] We had left the offices of Interstellar Voice three days ago, Earth time, and now as the immense disc of Jupiter flamed across the sky, entered the outer limits of the Baldric. Grannie Annie strode in the lead, her absurd long-skirted black dress looking as out of place in this desert as the trees. Flagpole trees. They rose straight up like enormous cat-tails, with only a melon-shaped protuberance at the top to show they were a form of vegetation. Everything else was blanketed by the sand and the powerful wind that blew from all quarters. As we reached the first of those trees, Grannie came to a halt. "This is the Baldric all right. If my calculations are right, we've hit it at its narrowest spot." Ezra Karn took a greasy pipe from his lips and spat. "It looks like the rest of this God-forsaken moon," he said, "'ceptin for them sticks." Xartal, the Martian illustrator, said nothing. He was like that, taciturn, speaking only when spoken to. He could be excused this time, however, for this was only our third day on Jupiter's Eighth Moon, and the country was still strange to us. When Annabella C. Flowers, that renowned writer of science fiction, visiphoned me at Crater City, Mars, to meet her here, I had thought she was crazy. But Miss Flowers, known to her friends as Grannie Annie, had always been mildly crazy. If you haven't read her books, you've missed something. She's the author of Lady of the Green Flames , Lady of the Runaway Planet , Lady of the Crimson Space-Beast , and other works of science fiction. Blood-and-thunder as these books are, however, they have one redeeming feature—authenticity of background. Grannie Annie was the original research digger-upper, and when she laid the setting of a yarn on a star of the sixth magnitude, only a transportation-velocity of less than light could prevent her from visiting her "stage" in person. Therefore when she asked me to meet her at the landing field of Interstellar Voice on Jupiter's Eighth Moon, I knew she had another novel in the state of embryo. What I didn't expect was Ezra Karn. He was an old prospector Grannie had met, and he had become so attached to the authoress he now followed her wherever she went. As for Xartal, he was a Martian and was slated to do the illustrations for Grannie's new book. Five minutes after my ship had blasted down, the four of us met in the offices of Interstellar Voice . And then I was shaking hands with Antlers Park, the manager of I. V. himself. "Glad to meet you," he said cordially. "I've just been trying to persuade Miss Flowers not to attempt a trip into the Baldric." "What's the Baldric?" I had asked. Antlers Park flicked the ash from his cheroot and shrugged. "Will you believe me, sir," he said, "when I tell you I've been out here on this forsaken moon five years and don't rightly know myself?" I scowled at that; it didn't make sense. "However, as you perhaps know, the only reason for colonial activities here at all is because of the presence of an ore known as Acoustix. It's no use to the people of Earth but of untold value on Mars. I'm not up on the scientific reasons, but it seems that life on the red planet has developed with a supersonic method of vocal communication. The Martian speaks as the Earthman does, but he amplifies his thoughts' transmission by way of wave lengths as high as three million vibrations per second. The trouble is that by the time the average Martian reaches middle age, his ability to produce those vibrations steadily decreases. Then it was found that this ore, Acoustix, revitalized their sounding apparatus, and the rush was on." "What do you mean?" Park leaned back. "The rush to find more of the ore," he explained. "But up until now this moon is the only place where it can be found. "There are two companies here," he continued, " Interstellar Voice and Larynx Incorporated . Chap by the name of Jimmy Baker runs that. However, the point is, between the properties of these two companies stretches a band or belt which has become known as the Baldric. "There are two principal forms of life in the Baldric; flagpole trees and a species of ornithoid resembling cockatoos. So far no one has crossed the Baldric without trouble." "What sort of trouble?" Grannie Annie had demanded. And when Antlers Park stuttered evasively, the old lady snorted, "Fiddlesticks, I never saw trouble yet that couldn't be explained. We leave in an hour." So now here we were at the outer reaches of the Baldric, four travelers on foot with only the barest necessities in the way of equipment and supplies. I walked forward to get a closer view of one of the flagpole trees. And then abruptly I saw something else. A queer-looking bird squatted there in the sand, looking up at me. Silver in plumage, it resembled a parrot with a crest; and yet it didn't. In some strange way the thing was a hideous caricature. "Look what I found," I yelled. "What I found," said the cockatoo in a very human voice. "Thunder, it talks," I said amazed. "Talks," repeated the bird, blinking its eyes. The cockatoo repeated my last statement again, then rose on its short legs, flapped its wings once and soared off into the sky. Xartal, the Martian illustrator, already had a notebook in his hands and was sketching a likeness of the creature. Ten minutes later we were on the move again. We saw more silver cockatoos and more flagpole trees. Above us, the great disc of Jupiter began to descend toward the horizon. And then all at once Grannie stopped again, this time at the top of a high ridge. She shielded her eyes and stared off into the plain we had just crossed. "Billy-boy," she said to me in a strange voice, "look down there and tell me what you see." I followed the direction of her hand and a shock went through me from head to foot. Down there, slowly toiling across the sand, advanced a party of four persons. In the lead was a little old lady in a black dress. Behind her strode a grizzled Earth man in a flop-brimmed hat, another Earth man, and a Martian. Detail for detail they were a duplicate of ourselves! "A mirage!" said Ezra Karn. But it wasn't a mirage. As the party came closer, we could see that their lips were moving, and their voices became audible. I listened in awe. The duplicate of myself was talking to the duplicate of Grannie Annie, and she was replying in the most natural way. Steadily the four travelers approached. Then, when a dozen yards away, they suddenly faded like a negative exposed to light and disappeared. "What do you make of it?" I said in a hushed voice. Grannie shook her head. "Might be a form of mass hypnosis superinduced by some chemical radiations," she replied. "Whatever it is, we'd better watch our step. There's no telling what might lie ahead." We walked after that with taut nerves and watchful eyes, but we saw no repetition of the "mirage." The wind continued to blow ceaselessly, and the sand seemed to grow more and more powdery. For some time I had fixed my gaze on a dot in the sky which I supposed to be a high-flying cockatoo. As that dot continued to move across the heavens in a single direction, I called Grannie's attention to it. "It's a kite," she nodded. "There should be a car attached to it somewhere." She offered no further explanation, but a quarter of an hour later as we topped another rise a curious elliptical car with a long slanting windscreen came into view. Attached to its hood was a taut wire which slanted up into the sky to connect with the kite. A man was driving and when he saw us, he waved. Five minutes later Grannie was shaking his hand vigorously and mumbling introductions. "This is Jimmy Baker," she said. "He manages Larynx Incorporated , and he's the real reason we're here." I decided I liked Baker the moment I saw him. In his middle thirties, he was tall and lean, with pleasant blue eyes which even his sand goggles could not conceal. "I can't tell you how glad I am you're here, Grannie," he said. "If anybody can help me, you can." Grannie's eyes glittered. "Trouble with the mine laborers?" she questioned. Jimmy Baker nodded. He told his story over the roar of the wind as we headed back across the desert. Occasionally he touched a stud on an electric windlass to which the kite wire was attached. Apparently these adjustments moved planes or fins on the kite and accounted for the car's ability to move in any direction. "If I weren't a realist, I'd say that Larynx Incorporated has been bewitched," he began slowly. "We pay our men high wages and give them excellent living conditions with a vacation on Callisto every year. Up until a short time ago most of them were in excellent health and spirits. Then the Red Spot Fever got them." "Red Spot Fever?" Grannie looked at him curiously. Jimmy Baker nodded. "The first symptoms are a tendency to garrulousness on the part of the patient. Then they disappear." He paused to make an adjustment of the windlass. "They walk out into the Baldric," he continued, "and nothing can stop them. We tried following them, of course, but it was no go. As soon as they realize they're being followed, they stop. But the moment our eyes are turned, they give us the slip." "But surely you must have some idea of where they go," Grannie said. Baker lit a cigarette. "There's all kinds of rumors," he replied, "but none of them will hold water. By the way, there's a cockatoo eyrie ahead of us." I followed his gaze and saw a curious structure suspended between a rude circle of flagpole trees. A strange web-like formation of translucent gauzy material, it was. Fully two hundred cockatoos were perched upon it. They watched us with their mild eyes as we passed, but they didn't move. After that we were rolling up the driveway that led to the offices of Larynx Incorporated . As Jimmy Baker led the way up the inclined ramp, a door in the central building opened, and a man emerged. His face was drawn. "Mr. Baker," he said breathlessly, "seventy-five workers at Shaft Four have headed out into the Baldric." Baker dropped his cigarette and ground his heel on it savagely. "Shaft Four, eh?" he repeated. "That's our principal mine. If the fever spreads there, I'm licked." He motioned us into his office and strode across to a desk. Silent Xartal, the Martian illustrator, took a chair in a corner and got his notebook out, sketching the room's interior. Grannie Annie remained standing. Presently the old lady walked across to the desk and helped herself to the bottle of Martian whiskey there. "There must be ways of stopping this," she said. "Have you called in any physicians? Why don't you call an enforced vacation and send the men away until the plague has died down?" Baker shook his head. "Three doctors from Callisto were here last month. They were as much at loss as I am. As for sending the men away, I may have to do that, but when I do, it means quits. Our company is chartered with Spacolonial, and you know what that means. Failure to produce during a period of thirty days or more, and you lose all rights." A visiphone bell sounded, and Baker walked across to the instrument. A man's face formed in the vision plate. Baker listened, said "Okay" and threw off the switch. "The entire crew of Shaft Four have gone out into the Baldric," he said slowly. There was a large map hanging on the wall back of Baker's desk. Grannie Annie walked across to it and began to study its markings. "Shaft Four is at the outer edge of the Baldric at a point where that corridor is at its widest," she said. Baker looked up. "That's right. We only began operations there a comparatively short time ago. Struck a rich vein of Acoustix that runs deep in. If that vein holds out, we'll double the output of Interstellar Voice , our rival, in a year." Grannie nodded. "I think you and I and Xartal had better take a run up there," she said. "But first I want to see your laboratory." There was no refusing her. Jimmy Baker led the way down to a lower level where a huge laboratory and experimental shop ran the length of the building. Grannie seized a light weight carry-case and began dropping articles into it. A pontocated glass lens, three or four Wellington radite bulbs, each with a spectroscopic filament, a small dynamo that would operate on a kite windlass, and a quantity of wire and other items. The kite car was brought out again, and the old woman, Baker and the Martian took their places in it. Then Jimmy waved, and the car began to roll down the ramp. Not until they had vanished in the desert haze did I sense the loneliness of this outpost. With that loneliness came a sudden sense of foreboding. Had I been a fool to let Grannie go? I thought of her, an old woman who should be in a rocking chair, knitting socks. If anything happened to Annabella C. Flowers, I would never forgive myself and neither would her millions of readers. Ezra Karn and I went back into the office. The old prospector chuckled. "Dang human dynamo. Got more energy than a runaway comet." A connecting door on the far side of the office opened onto a long corridor which ended at a staircase. "Let's look around," I said. We passed down the corridor and climbed the staircase to the second floor. Here were the general offices of Larynx Incorporated , and through glass doors I could see clerks busy with counting machines and report tapes. In another chamber the extremely light Acoustix ore was being packed into big cases and marked for shipment. At the far end a door to a small room stood open. Inside a young man was tilted back in a swivel chair before a complicated instrument panel. "C'mon in," he said, seeing us. "If you want a look at your friends, here they are." He flicked a stud, and the entire wall above the panel underwent a slow change of colors. Those colors whirled kaleidescopically, then coalesced into a three-dimensional scene. It was a scene of a rapidly unfolding desert country as seen from the rear of a kite car. Directly behind the windscreen, backs turned to me, were Jimmy Baker, Grannie, and Xartal. It was as if I were standing directly behind them. "It's Mr. Baker's own invention," the operator said. "An improvement on the visiphone." "Do you mean to say you can follow the movements of that car and its passengers wherever it goes? Can you hear them talk too?" "Sure." The operator turned another dial, and Grannie's falsetto voice entered the room. It stopped abruptly. "The machine uses a lot of power," the operator said, "and as yet we haven't got much." The cloud of anxiety which had wrapped itself about me disappeared somewhat as I viewed this device. At least I could now keep myself posted of Grannie's movements. Karn and I went down to the commissary where we ate our supper. When we returned to Jimmy Baker's office, the visiphone bell was ringing. I went over to it and turned it on, and to my surprise the face of Antlers Park flashed on the screen. "Hello," he said in his friendly way. "I see you arrived all right. Is Miss Flowers there?" "Miss Flowers left with Mr. Baker for Shaft Four," I said. "There's trouble up there. Red spot fever." "Fever, eh?" repeated Park. "That's a shame. Is there anything I can do?" "Tell me," I said, "has your company had any trouble with this plague?" "A little. But up until yesterday the fever's been confined to the other side of the Baldric. We had one partial case, but my chemists gave the chap an antitoxin that seems to have worked. Come to think of it, I might drive over to Shaft Four and give Jimmy Baker the formula. I haven't been out in the Baldric for years, but if you didn't have any trouble, I shouldn't either." We exchanged a few more pleasantries, and then he rang off. In exactly an hour I went upstairs to the visiscreen room. Then once more I was directly behind my friends, listening in on their conversation. The view through the windscreen showed an irregular array of flagpole trees, with the sky dotted by high-flying cockatoos. "There's an eyrie over there," Jimmy Baker was saying. "We might as well camp beside it." Moments later a rude circle of flagpole trees loomed ahead. Across the top of them was stretched a translucent web. Jimmy and Grannie got out of the car and began making camp. Xartal remained in his seat. He was drawing pictures on large pieces of pasteboard, and as I stood there in the visiscreen room, I watched him. There was no doubt about it, the Martian was clever. He would make a few rapid lines on one of the pasteboards, rub it a little to get the proper shading and then go on to the next. In swift rotation likenesses of Ezra Karn, of myself, of Jimmy Baker, and of Antlers Park took form. Ezra spoke over my shoulder. "He's doing scenes for Grannie's new book," he said. "The old lady figures on using the events here for a plot. Look at that damned nosy bird! " A silver cockatoo had alighted on the kite car and was surveying curiously Xartal's work. As each drawing was completed, the bird scanned it with rapt attention. Abruptly it flew to the top of the eyrie, where it seemed to be having a consultation with its bird companions. And then abruptly it happened. The cockatoos took off in mass flight. A group of Earth people suddenly materialized on the eyrie, talking and moving about as if it were the most natural thing in the world. With a shock I saw the likeness of myself; I saw Ezra Karn; and I saw the image of Jimmy Baker. The real Jimmy Baker stood next to Grannie, staring up at this incredible mirage. Grannie let out a whoop. "I've got it!" she said. "Those things we see up there are nothing more than mental images. They're Xartal's drawings!" "Don't you see," the lady continued. "Everything that Xartal put on paper has been seen by one or more of these cockatoos. The cockatoos are like Earth parrots all right, but not only have they the power of copying speech, they also have the ability to recreate a mental image of what they have seen. In other words their brains form a powerful photographic impression of the object. That impression is then transmitted simultaneously in telepathic wavelengths to common foci. That eyrie might be likened to a cinema screen, receiving brain vibrations from a hundred different sources that blend into the light field to form what are apparently three-dimensional images." The Larynx manager nodded slowly. "I see," he said. "But why don't the birds reconstruct images from the actual person. Why use drawings?" "Probably because the drawings are exaggerated in certain details and made a greater impression on their brains," Grannie replied. Up on the eyrie a strange performance was taking place. The duplicate of Grannie Annie was bowing to the duplicate of Jimmy Baker, and the image of Ezra Karn was playing leap frog with the image of Antlers Park. Then abruptly the screen before me blurred and went blank. "Sorry," the operator said. "I've used too much power already. Have to give the generators a chance to build it up again." Nodding, I turned and motioned to Karn. We went back downstairs. "That explains something at any rate," the old prospector said. "But how about that Red spot fever?" On Jimmy Baker's desk was a large file marked: FEVER VICTIMS. I opened it and found it contained the case histories of those men who had been attacked by the strange malady. Reading them over, I was struck by one detail. Each patient had received the first symptoms, not while working in the mines, but while sleeping or lounging in the barracks. Five minutes later Karn and I were striding down a white ramp that led to the nearest barracks. The building came into sight, a low rectangular structure, dome-roofed to withstand the violent winds. Inside double tiers of bunks stretched along either wall. In those bunks some thirty men lay sleeping. The far wall was taken up by a huge window of denvo-quartz. As I stood there, something suddenly caught Ezra Karn's eye. He began to walk toward that window. "Look here," he said. Six feet up on that window a small almost imperceptible button of dull metal had been wedged into an aperture cut in the quartz. The central part of the button appeared to be a powerful lens of some kind, and as I seized it and pulled it loose, I felt the hum of tiny clock work. All at once I had it! Red spot fever. Heat fever from the infra-red rays of Jupiter's great spot. Someone had constructed this lens to concentrate and amplify the power of those rays. The internal clockwork served a double purpose. It opened a shutter, and it rotated the lens slowly so that it played for a time on each of the sleeping men. I slid the metal button in my pocket and left the barracks at a run. Back in the visiscreen room, I snapped to the operator: "Turn it on!" The kite car swam into view in the screen above the instrument panel. I stared with open eyes. Jimmy Baker no longer was in the car, nor was Xartal, the Martian. Grannie Annie was there, but seated at the controls was Antlers Park, the manager of Interstellar Voice. Ezra Karn jabbed my elbow. "Grannie's coming back. I thought she'd be getting sick of this blamed moon." It didn't make sense. In all the years I'd known Annabella C. Flowers, never yet had I seen her desert a case until she had woven the clues and facts to a logical conclusion. "Ezra," I said, "we're going to drive out and meet them. There's something screwy here." Ten minutes later in another kite car we were driving at a fast clip through the powdery sands of the Baldric. And before long we saw another car approaching. It was Grannie. As the car drew up alongside I saw her sitting in her prim way next to Antlers Park. Park said: "We left the others at the mine. Miss Flowers is going back with me to my offices to help me improve the formula for that new antitoxin." He waved his hand, and the car moved off. I watched it as it sped across the desert, and a growing suspicion began to form in my mind. Then, like a knife thrust, the truth struck me. "Ezra!" I yelled, swinging the car. "That wasn't Grannie! That was one of those damned cockatoo images. We've got to catch him." The other car was some distance ahead now. Park looked back and saw us following. He did something to the kite wire, and his car leaped ahead. I threw the speed indicator hard over. Our kite was a huge box affair with a steady powerful pull to the connecting wire. Park's vehicle was drawn by a flat triangular kite that dove and fluttered with each variance of the wind. Steadily we began to close in. The manager of Interstellar Voice turned again, and something glinted in his hand. There was a flash of purple flame, and a round hole appeared in our windscreen inches above Karn's head. "Heat gun!" Ezra yelled. Now we were rocketing over the sand dunes, winding in and out between the flagpole trees. I had to catch that car I told myself. Grannie Annie's very life might be at stake, not to mention the lives of hundreds of mine workers. Again Park took aim and again a hole shattered our windscreen. The wind shifted and blew from another quarter. The box kite soared, but the triangular kite faltered. Taking advantage of Park's loss of speed, I raced alongside. The I. V. manager lifted his weapon frantically. But before he could use it a third time, Ezra Karn had whipped a lariat from his belt and sent it coiling across the intervening space. The thong yanked tight about the manager's throat. Park did the only thing he could do. He shut off power, and the two cars coasted to a halt. Then I was across in the other seat, wrenching the weapon free from his grasp. "What have you done with Miss Flowers?" I demanded. The manager's eyes glittered with fear as he saw my finger tense on the trigger. Weakly he lifted an arm and pointed to the northwest. "Val-ley. Thir-ty miles. Entrance hidden by wall of ... flagpole trees." I leaped into the driver's seat and gave the kite its head. And now the country began to undergo a subtle change. The trees seemed to group themselves in a long flanking corridor in a northwesterly direction, as if to hide some secret that lay beyond. Twice I attempted to penetrate that wall, only to find my way blocked by those curious growths. Then a corridor opened before me; a mile forward and the desert began again. But it was a new desert this time: the sand packed hard as granite, the way ahead utterly devoid of vegetation. In the distance black bulging hills extended to right and left, with a narrow chasm or doorway between. I headed for that entrance, and when I reached it, I shut off power with an exclamation of astonishment. There was a huge chair-shaped rock there, and seated upon it was Grannie Annie. She had a tablet in her hands, and she was writing. "Grannie!" I yelled. "What're you doing here? Where's Mr. Baker?" She rose to her feet and clambered down the rock. "Getting back Jimmy's mine laborers," she said, a twinkle in her eyes. "I see you've got Antlers Park. I'm glad of that. It saves me a lot of trouble." She took off her spectacles and wiped them on her sleeve. "Don't look so fuddled, Billy-boy. Come along, and I'll show you." She led the way through the narrow passage into the valley. A deep gorge, it was, with the black sheer cliffs on either side pressing close. Ten feet forward, I stopped short, staring in amazement. Advancing toward me like a column of infantry came a long line of Larynx miners. They walked slowly, looking straight ahead, moving down the center of the gorge toward the entrance. But there was more! A kite car was drawn up to the side. The windscreen had been removed, and mounted on the hood was a large bullet-like contrivance that looked not unlike a search lamp. A blinding shaft of bluish radiance spewed from its open end. Playing it back and forth upon the marching men were Jimmy Baker and Xartal, the Martian. "Ultra violet," Grannie Annie explained. "The opposite end of the vibratory scale and the only thing that will combat the infra-red rays that cause red spot fever. Those men won't stop walking until they've reached Shaft Four." Grannie Annie told her story during the long ride back to Shaft Four. We drove slowly, keeping the line of marching Larynx miners always ahead of us. Jimmy Baker had struck a new big lode of Acoustix, a lode which if worked successfully would see Larynx Incorporated become a far more powerful exporting concern than Interstellar Voice . Antlers Park didn't want that. It was he or his agents who placed those lens buttons in the Larynx barracks. For he knew that just as Jupiter's great spot was responsible for a climate and atmosphere suitable for an Earthman on this Eighth Moon, so also was that spot a deadly power in itself, capable when its rays were concentrated of causing a fatal sickness. Then suddenly becoming fearful of Grannie's prying, Antlers Park strove to head her off before she reached Shaft Four. He did head her off and managed to lure her and Baker and Xartal into the Shaft barracks where they would be exposed to the rays from the lens button. But Grannie only pretended to contract the plague. Park then attempted to outwit Ezra Karn and me by returning in Jimmy Baker's kite car with a cockatoo image of Grannie. I listened to all this in silence. "But," I said when she had finished, "how did Park manage to have that image created and why did the mine laborers walk out into the Baldric when they contracted the fever?" Grannie Annie frowned. "I'm not sure I can answer the first of those questions," she replied. "You must remember Antlers Park has been on this moon five years and during that time he must have acquainted himself with many of its secrets. Probably he learned long ago just what to do to make a cockatoo create a mental image. "As for the men going out into the Baldric, that was more of Park's diabolical work. In the walls of the barracks besides those lens buttons were also miniature electro-hypnotic plates, with the master controlling unit located in that valley. Park knew that when the miners were in a drugged condition from the effects of the fever they would be susceptible to the machine's lure.... And now, Billy-boy, are you coming with me?" "Coming with you?" I repeated. "Where?" The old lady lit a cigarette. "Pluto maybe," she said. "There's a penal colony there, you know, and that ought to tie in nicely with a new crime story. I can see it now ... prison break, stolen rocket ship, fugitives lurking in the interplanetary lanes...." "Grannie," I laughed. "You're incorrigible!"

What is the plot of the story?

10

The mining for a precious ore called Acoustix has spurred colonization of Jupiter’s eighth moon by two mining companies called Interstellar Voice and Larynx Incorporated. There is a barren desert landscape between the mining areas of the two companies that is called the Baldric. The only plant appears to be trees that have melon-shaped tops, and the only animal is a silver parrot-like bird that is capable of imitating human speech, and also of imitating human forms in a holographic-like manner. Grannie Annie (AKA Annabella C. Flowers) is a famous science fiction writer, who is travelling to the Baldric with her martian employee, Xartal, who takes detailed drawings that are the background research for her next novel. She is travelling in a party of four: herself, Xartal, Ezra Karn (old prospector), and the narrator (called Billy-boy by Grannie). Strange happenings are known to occur in the Baldric. They encounter a silver bird that repeats English words and creates what seems like a mirage of themselves projected in the distance which disappears as it comes closer. They do not know at the time, but the parrot has created this mirage based on viewing one of the lifelike drawings that Xartal is making of the group. They happen to run into Jimmy Baker, the manager of the Larynx Incorporated mining company, who is interested in Grannie’s help sorting out the root cause of his workers coming down with “red spot fever” which causes them to leave their work and walk into the Baldric, never to return. They travel to Larynx Incorporated’s offices with Jimmy, where he learns all of the workers from Shaft Four have left their posts due to the fever. Coincidentally, that is also their most productive ore location. Jimmy, Grannie, and Xartal take off to Shaft Four via the Baldric to investigate what is going on. During their travel, they break for camp near a flock of the birds and discover their ability to imitate human forms. Antlers Karn, the manager of Interstellar Voice, turns out to be a bad guy who ambushes Grannie’s camp. He is trying to sabotage Jimmy’s company by causing the red spot fever to stop them from capitalizing on a huge deposit of Acoustix they discovered in Shaft Four. He steals Jimmy’s car and kidnaps a mirage-version of Grannie. Billy and Ezra chase them down and discover Antlers has stranded their friends in a valley thirty miles away. Grannie has independently solved the mystery of the Red Spot Fever and sending her mirage with Antlers was part of her master plan. When Billy and Ezra return to her, Jimmy is projecting ultra-violet light onto a large group of the Shaft Four workers in a deep valley gorge. This counteracts the infra-red radiation that put them into a trance-like state that caused them to wander into the desert. Grannie, Jimmy, Xartal, Billy, and Ezra are triumphantly returning the workers to Shaft Four at the close of the story.

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Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net DOUBLE TROUBLE by CARL JACOBI Grannie Annie, that waspish science-fiction writer, was in a jam again. What with red-spot fever, talking cockatoos and flagpole trees, I was running in circles—especially since Grannie became twins every now and then. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] We had left the offices of Interstellar Voice three days ago, Earth time, and now as the immense disc of Jupiter flamed across the sky, entered the outer limits of the Baldric. Grannie Annie strode in the lead, her absurd long-skirted black dress looking as out of place in this desert as the trees. Flagpole trees. They rose straight up like enormous cat-tails, with only a melon-shaped protuberance at the top to show they were a form of vegetation. Everything else was blanketed by the sand and the powerful wind that blew from all quarters. As we reached the first of those trees, Grannie came to a halt. "This is the Baldric all right. If my calculations are right, we've hit it at its narrowest spot." Ezra Karn took a greasy pipe from his lips and spat. "It looks like the rest of this God-forsaken moon," he said, "'ceptin for them sticks." Xartal, the Martian illustrator, said nothing. He was like that, taciturn, speaking only when spoken to. He could be excused this time, however, for this was only our third day on Jupiter's Eighth Moon, and the country was still strange to us. When Annabella C. Flowers, that renowned writer of science fiction, visiphoned me at Crater City, Mars, to meet her here, I had thought she was crazy. But Miss Flowers, known to her friends as Grannie Annie, had always been mildly crazy. If you haven't read her books, you've missed something. She's the author of Lady of the Green Flames , Lady of the Runaway Planet , Lady of the Crimson Space-Beast , and other works of science fiction. Blood-and-thunder as these books are, however, they have one redeeming feature—authenticity of background. Grannie Annie was the original research digger-upper, and when she laid the setting of a yarn on a star of the sixth magnitude, only a transportation-velocity of less than light could prevent her from visiting her "stage" in person. Therefore when she asked me to meet her at the landing field of Interstellar Voice on Jupiter's Eighth Moon, I knew she had another novel in the state of embryo. What I didn't expect was Ezra Karn. He was an old prospector Grannie had met, and he had become so attached to the authoress he now followed her wherever she went. As for Xartal, he was a Martian and was slated to do the illustrations for Grannie's new book. Five minutes after my ship had blasted down, the four of us met in the offices of Interstellar Voice . And then I was shaking hands with Antlers Park, the manager of I. V. himself. "Glad to meet you," he said cordially. "I've just been trying to persuade Miss Flowers not to attempt a trip into the Baldric." "What's the Baldric?" I had asked. Antlers Park flicked the ash from his cheroot and shrugged. "Will you believe me, sir," he said, "when I tell you I've been out here on this forsaken moon five years and don't rightly know myself?" I scowled at that; it didn't make sense. "However, as you perhaps know, the only reason for colonial activities here at all is because of the presence of an ore known as Acoustix. It's no use to the people of Earth but of untold value on Mars. I'm not up on the scientific reasons, but it seems that life on the red planet has developed with a supersonic method of vocal communication. The Martian speaks as the Earthman does, but he amplifies his thoughts' transmission by way of wave lengths as high as three million vibrations per second. The trouble is that by the time the average Martian reaches middle age, his ability to produce those vibrations steadily decreases. Then it was found that this ore, Acoustix, revitalized their sounding apparatus, and the rush was on." "What do you mean?" Park leaned back. "The rush to find more of the ore," he explained. "But up until now this moon is the only place where it can be found. "There are two companies here," he continued, " Interstellar Voice and Larynx Incorporated . Chap by the name of Jimmy Baker runs that. However, the point is, between the properties of these two companies stretches a band or belt which has become known as the Baldric. "There are two principal forms of life in the Baldric; flagpole trees and a species of ornithoid resembling cockatoos. So far no one has crossed the Baldric without trouble." "What sort of trouble?" Grannie Annie had demanded. And when Antlers Park stuttered evasively, the old lady snorted, "Fiddlesticks, I never saw trouble yet that couldn't be explained. We leave in an hour." So now here we were at the outer reaches of the Baldric, four travelers on foot with only the barest necessities in the way of equipment and supplies. I walked forward to get a closer view of one of the flagpole trees. And then abruptly I saw something else. A queer-looking bird squatted there in the sand, looking up at me. Silver in plumage, it resembled a parrot with a crest; and yet it didn't. In some strange way the thing was a hideous caricature. "Look what I found," I yelled. "What I found," said the cockatoo in a very human voice. "Thunder, it talks," I said amazed. "Talks," repeated the bird, blinking its eyes. The cockatoo repeated my last statement again, then rose on its short legs, flapped its wings once and soared off into the sky. Xartal, the Martian illustrator, already had a notebook in his hands and was sketching a likeness of the creature. Ten minutes later we were on the move again. We saw more silver cockatoos and more flagpole trees. Above us, the great disc of Jupiter began to descend toward the horizon. And then all at once Grannie stopped again, this time at the top of a high ridge. She shielded her eyes and stared off into the plain we had just crossed. "Billy-boy," she said to me in a strange voice, "look down there and tell me what you see." I followed the direction of her hand and a shock went through me from head to foot. Down there, slowly toiling across the sand, advanced a party of four persons. In the lead was a little old lady in a black dress. Behind her strode a grizzled Earth man in a flop-brimmed hat, another Earth man, and a Martian. Detail for detail they were a duplicate of ourselves! "A mirage!" said Ezra Karn. But it wasn't a mirage. As the party came closer, we could see that their lips were moving, and their voices became audible. I listened in awe. The duplicate of myself was talking to the duplicate of Grannie Annie, and she was replying in the most natural way. Steadily the four travelers approached. Then, when a dozen yards away, they suddenly faded like a negative exposed to light and disappeared. "What do you make of it?" I said in a hushed voice. Grannie shook her head. "Might be a form of mass hypnosis superinduced by some chemical radiations," she replied. "Whatever it is, we'd better watch our step. There's no telling what might lie ahead." We walked after that with taut nerves and watchful eyes, but we saw no repetition of the "mirage." The wind continued to blow ceaselessly, and the sand seemed to grow more and more powdery. For some time I had fixed my gaze on a dot in the sky which I supposed to be a high-flying cockatoo. As that dot continued to move across the heavens in a single direction, I called Grannie's attention to it. "It's a kite," she nodded. "There should be a car attached to it somewhere." She offered no further explanation, but a quarter of an hour later as we topped another rise a curious elliptical car with a long slanting windscreen came into view. Attached to its hood was a taut wire which slanted up into the sky to connect with the kite. A man was driving and when he saw us, he waved. Five minutes later Grannie was shaking his hand vigorously and mumbling introductions. "This is Jimmy Baker," she said. "He manages Larynx Incorporated , and he's the real reason we're here." I decided I liked Baker the moment I saw him. In his middle thirties, he was tall and lean, with pleasant blue eyes which even his sand goggles could not conceal. "I can't tell you how glad I am you're here, Grannie," he said. "If anybody can help me, you can." Grannie's eyes glittered. "Trouble with the mine laborers?" she questioned. Jimmy Baker nodded. He told his story over the roar of the wind as we headed back across the desert. Occasionally he touched a stud on an electric windlass to which the kite wire was attached. Apparently these adjustments moved planes or fins on the kite and accounted for the car's ability to move in any direction. "If I weren't a realist, I'd say that Larynx Incorporated has been bewitched," he began slowly. "We pay our men high wages and give them excellent living conditions with a vacation on Callisto every year. Up until a short time ago most of them were in excellent health and spirits. Then the Red Spot Fever got them." "Red Spot Fever?" Grannie looked at him curiously. Jimmy Baker nodded. "The first symptoms are a tendency to garrulousness on the part of the patient. Then they disappear." He paused to make an adjustment of the windlass. "They walk out into the Baldric," he continued, "and nothing can stop them. We tried following them, of course, but it was no go. As soon as they realize they're being followed, they stop. But the moment our eyes are turned, they give us the slip." "But surely you must have some idea of where they go," Grannie said. Baker lit a cigarette. "There's all kinds of rumors," he replied, "but none of them will hold water. By the way, there's a cockatoo eyrie ahead of us." I followed his gaze and saw a curious structure suspended between a rude circle of flagpole trees. A strange web-like formation of translucent gauzy material, it was. Fully two hundred cockatoos were perched upon it. They watched us with their mild eyes as we passed, but they didn't move. After that we were rolling up the driveway that led to the offices of Larynx Incorporated . As Jimmy Baker led the way up the inclined ramp, a door in the central building opened, and a man emerged. His face was drawn. "Mr. Baker," he said breathlessly, "seventy-five workers at Shaft Four have headed out into the Baldric." Baker dropped his cigarette and ground his heel on it savagely. "Shaft Four, eh?" he repeated. "That's our principal mine. If the fever spreads there, I'm licked." He motioned us into his office and strode across to a desk. Silent Xartal, the Martian illustrator, took a chair in a corner and got his notebook out, sketching the room's interior. Grannie Annie remained standing. Presently the old lady walked across to the desk and helped herself to the bottle of Martian whiskey there. "There must be ways of stopping this," she said. "Have you called in any physicians? Why don't you call an enforced vacation and send the men away until the plague has died down?" Baker shook his head. "Three doctors from Callisto were here last month. They were as much at loss as I am. As for sending the men away, I may have to do that, but when I do, it means quits. Our company is chartered with Spacolonial, and you know what that means. Failure to produce during a period of thirty days or more, and you lose all rights." A visiphone bell sounded, and Baker walked across to the instrument. A man's face formed in the vision plate. Baker listened, said "Okay" and threw off the switch. "The entire crew of Shaft Four have gone out into the Baldric," he said slowly. There was a large map hanging on the wall back of Baker's desk. Grannie Annie walked across to it and began to study its markings. "Shaft Four is at the outer edge of the Baldric at a point where that corridor is at its widest," she said. Baker looked up. "That's right. We only began operations there a comparatively short time ago. Struck a rich vein of Acoustix that runs deep in. If that vein holds out, we'll double the output of Interstellar Voice , our rival, in a year." Grannie nodded. "I think you and I and Xartal had better take a run up there," she said. "But first I want to see your laboratory." There was no refusing her. Jimmy Baker led the way down to a lower level where a huge laboratory and experimental shop ran the length of the building. Grannie seized a light weight carry-case and began dropping articles into it. A pontocated glass lens, three or four Wellington radite bulbs, each with a spectroscopic filament, a small dynamo that would operate on a kite windlass, and a quantity of wire and other items. The kite car was brought out again, and the old woman, Baker and the Martian took their places in it. Then Jimmy waved, and the car began to roll down the ramp. Not until they had vanished in the desert haze did I sense the loneliness of this outpost. With that loneliness came a sudden sense of foreboding. Had I been a fool to let Grannie go? I thought of her, an old woman who should be in a rocking chair, knitting socks. If anything happened to Annabella C. Flowers, I would never forgive myself and neither would her millions of readers. Ezra Karn and I went back into the office. The old prospector chuckled. "Dang human dynamo. Got more energy than a runaway comet." A connecting door on the far side of the office opened onto a long corridor which ended at a staircase. "Let's look around," I said. We passed down the corridor and climbed the staircase to the second floor. Here were the general offices of Larynx Incorporated , and through glass doors I could see clerks busy with counting machines and report tapes. In another chamber the extremely light Acoustix ore was being packed into big cases and marked for shipment. At the far end a door to a small room stood open. Inside a young man was tilted back in a swivel chair before a complicated instrument panel. "C'mon in," he said, seeing us. "If you want a look at your friends, here they are." He flicked a stud, and the entire wall above the panel underwent a slow change of colors. Those colors whirled kaleidescopically, then coalesced into a three-dimensional scene. It was a scene of a rapidly unfolding desert country as seen from the rear of a kite car. Directly behind the windscreen, backs turned to me, were Jimmy Baker, Grannie, and Xartal. It was as if I were standing directly behind them. "It's Mr. Baker's own invention," the operator said. "An improvement on the visiphone." "Do you mean to say you can follow the movements of that car and its passengers wherever it goes? Can you hear them talk too?" "Sure." The operator turned another dial, and Grannie's falsetto voice entered the room. It stopped abruptly. "The machine uses a lot of power," the operator said, "and as yet we haven't got much." The cloud of anxiety which had wrapped itself about me disappeared somewhat as I viewed this device. At least I could now keep myself posted of Grannie's movements. Karn and I went down to the commissary where we ate our supper. When we returned to Jimmy Baker's office, the visiphone bell was ringing. I went over to it and turned it on, and to my surprise the face of Antlers Park flashed on the screen. "Hello," he said in his friendly way. "I see you arrived all right. Is Miss Flowers there?" "Miss Flowers left with Mr. Baker for Shaft Four," I said. "There's trouble up there. Red spot fever." "Fever, eh?" repeated Park. "That's a shame. Is there anything I can do?" "Tell me," I said, "has your company had any trouble with this plague?" "A little. But up until yesterday the fever's been confined to the other side of the Baldric. We had one partial case, but my chemists gave the chap an antitoxin that seems to have worked. Come to think of it, I might drive over to Shaft Four and give Jimmy Baker the formula. I haven't been out in the Baldric for years, but if you didn't have any trouble, I shouldn't either." We exchanged a few more pleasantries, and then he rang off. In exactly an hour I went upstairs to the visiscreen room. Then once more I was directly behind my friends, listening in on their conversation. The view through the windscreen showed an irregular array of flagpole trees, with the sky dotted by high-flying cockatoos. "There's an eyrie over there," Jimmy Baker was saying. "We might as well camp beside it." Moments later a rude circle of flagpole trees loomed ahead. Across the top of them was stretched a translucent web. Jimmy and Grannie got out of the car and began making camp. Xartal remained in his seat. He was drawing pictures on large pieces of pasteboard, and as I stood there in the visiscreen room, I watched him. There was no doubt about it, the Martian was clever. He would make a few rapid lines on one of the pasteboards, rub it a little to get the proper shading and then go on to the next. In swift rotation likenesses of Ezra Karn, of myself, of Jimmy Baker, and of Antlers Park took form. Ezra spoke over my shoulder. "He's doing scenes for Grannie's new book," he said. "The old lady figures on using the events here for a plot. Look at that damned nosy bird! " A silver cockatoo had alighted on the kite car and was surveying curiously Xartal's work. As each drawing was completed, the bird scanned it with rapt attention. Abruptly it flew to the top of the eyrie, where it seemed to be having a consultation with its bird companions. And then abruptly it happened. The cockatoos took off in mass flight. A group of Earth people suddenly materialized on the eyrie, talking and moving about as if it were the most natural thing in the world. With a shock I saw the likeness of myself; I saw Ezra Karn; and I saw the image of Jimmy Baker. The real Jimmy Baker stood next to Grannie, staring up at this incredible mirage. Grannie let out a whoop. "I've got it!" she said. "Those things we see up there are nothing more than mental images. They're Xartal's drawings!" "Don't you see," the lady continued. "Everything that Xartal put on paper has been seen by one or more of these cockatoos. The cockatoos are like Earth parrots all right, but not only have they the power of copying speech, they also have the ability to recreate a mental image of what they have seen. In other words their brains form a powerful photographic impression of the object. That impression is then transmitted simultaneously in telepathic wavelengths to common foci. That eyrie might be likened to a cinema screen, receiving brain vibrations from a hundred different sources that blend into the light field to form what are apparently three-dimensional images." The Larynx manager nodded slowly. "I see," he said. "But why don't the birds reconstruct images from the actual person. Why use drawings?" "Probably because the drawings are exaggerated in certain details and made a greater impression on their brains," Grannie replied. Up on the eyrie a strange performance was taking place. The duplicate of Grannie Annie was bowing to the duplicate of Jimmy Baker, and the image of Ezra Karn was playing leap frog with the image of Antlers Park. Then abruptly the screen before me blurred and went blank. "Sorry," the operator said. "I've used too much power already. Have to give the generators a chance to build it up again." Nodding, I turned and motioned to Karn. We went back downstairs. "That explains something at any rate," the old prospector said. "But how about that Red spot fever?" On Jimmy Baker's desk was a large file marked: FEVER VICTIMS. I opened it and found it contained the case histories of those men who had been attacked by the strange malady. Reading them over, I was struck by one detail. Each patient had received the first symptoms, not while working in the mines, but while sleeping or lounging in the barracks. Five minutes later Karn and I were striding down a white ramp that led to the nearest barracks. The building came into sight, a low rectangular structure, dome-roofed to withstand the violent winds. Inside double tiers of bunks stretched along either wall. In those bunks some thirty men lay sleeping. The far wall was taken up by a huge window of denvo-quartz. As I stood there, something suddenly caught Ezra Karn's eye. He began to walk toward that window. "Look here," he said. Six feet up on that window a small almost imperceptible button of dull metal had been wedged into an aperture cut in the quartz. The central part of the button appeared to be a powerful lens of some kind, and as I seized it and pulled it loose, I felt the hum of tiny clock work. All at once I had it! Red spot fever. Heat fever from the infra-red rays of Jupiter's great spot. Someone had constructed this lens to concentrate and amplify the power of those rays. The internal clockwork served a double purpose. It opened a shutter, and it rotated the lens slowly so that it played for a time on each of the sleeping men. I slid the metal button in my pocket and left the barracks at a run. Back in the visiscreen room, I snapped to the operator: "Turn it on!" The kite car swam into view in the screen above the instrument panel. I stared with open eyes. Jimmy Baker no longer was in the car, nor was Xartal, the Martian. Grannie Annie was there, but seated at the controls was Antlers Park, the manager of Interstellar Voice. Ezra Karn jabbed my elbow. "Grannie's coming back. I thought she'd be getting sick of this blamed moon." It didn't make sense. In all the years I'd known Annabella C. Flowers, never yet had I seen her desert a case until she had woven the clues and facts to a logical conclusion. "Ezra," I said, "we're going to drive out and meet them. There's something screwy here." Ten minutes later in another kite car we were driving at a fast clip through the powdery sands of the Baldric. And before long we saw another car approaching. It was Grannie. As the car drew up alongside I saw her sitting in her prim way next to Antlers Park. Park said: "We left the others at the mine. Miss Flowers is going back with me to my offices to help me improve the formula for that new antitoxin." He waved his hand, and the car moved off. I watched it as it sped across the desert, and a growing suspicion began to form in my mind. Then, like a knife thrust, the truth struck me. "Ezra!" I yelled, swinging the car. "That wasn't Grannie! That was one of those damned cockatoo images. We've got to catch him." The other car was some distance ahead now. Park looked back and saw us following. He did something to the kite wire, and his car leaped ahead. I threw the speed indicator hard over. Our kite was a huge box affair with a steady powerful pull to the connecting wire. Park's vehicle was drawn by a flat triangular kite that dove and fluttered with each variance of the wind. Steadily we began to close in. The manager of Interstellar Voice turned again, and something glinted in his hand. There was a flash of purple flame, and a round hole appeared in our windscreen inches above Karn's head. "Heat gun!" Ezra yelled. Now we were rocketing over the sand dunes, winding in and out between the flagpole trees. I had to catch that car I told myself. Grannie Annie's very life might be at stake, not to mention the lives of hundreds of mine workers. Again Park took aim and again a hole shattered our windscreen. The wind shifted and blew from another quarter. The box kite soared, but the triangular kite faltered. Taking advantage of Park's loss of speed, I raced alongside. The I. V. manager lifted his weapon frantically. But before he could use it a third time, Ezra Karn had whipped a lariat from his belt and sent it coiling across the intervening space. The thong yanked tight about the manager's throat. Park did the only thing he could do. He shut off power, and the two cars coasted to a halt. Then I was across in the other seat, wrenching the weapon free from his grasp. "What have you done with Miss Flowers?" I demanded. The manager's eyes glittered with fear as he saw my finger tense on the trigger. Weakly he lifted an arm and pointed to the northwest. "Val-ley. Thir-ty miles. Entrance hidden by wall of ... flagpole trees." I leaped into the driver's seat and gave the kite its head. And now the country began to undergo a subtle change. The trees seemed to group themselves in a long flanking corridor in a northwesterly direction, as if to hide some secret that lay beyond. Twice I attempted to penetrate that wall, only to find my way blocked by those curious growths. Then a corridor opened before me; a mile forward and the desert began again. But it was a new desert this time: the sand packed hard as granite, the way ahead utterly devoid of vegetation. In the distance black bulging hills extended to right and left, with a narrow chasm or doorway between. I headed for that entrance, and when I reached it, I shut off power with an exclamation of astonishment. There was a huge chair-shaped rock there, and seated upon it was Grannie Annie. She had a tablet in her hands, and she was writing. "Grannie!" I yelled. "What're you doing here? Where's Mr. Baker?" She rose to her feet and clambered down the rock. "Getting back Jimmy's mine laborers," she said, a twinkle in her eyes. "I see you've got Antlers Park. I'm glad of that. It saves me a lot of trouble." She took off her spectacles and wiped them on her sleeve. "Don't look so fuddled, Billy-boy. Come along, and I'll show you." She led the way through the narrow passage into the valley. A deep gorge, it was, with the black sheer cliffs on either side pressing close. Ten feet forward, I stopped short, staring in amazement. Advancing toward me like a column of infantry came a long line of Larynx miners. They walked slowly, looking straight ahead, moving down the center of the gorge toward the entrance. But there was more! A kite car was drawn up to the side. The windscreen had been removed, and mounted on the hood was a large bullet-like contrivance that looked not unlike a search lamp. A blinding shaft of bluish radiance spewed from its open end. Playing it back and forth upon the marching men were Jimmy Baker and Xartal, the Martian. "Ultra violet," Grannie Annie explained. "The opposite end of the vibratory scale and the only thing that will combat the infra-red rays that cause red spot fever. Those men won't stop walking until they've reached Shaft Four." Grannie Annie told her story during the long ride back to Shaft Four. We drove slowly, keeping the line of marching Larynx miners always ahead of us. Jimmy Baker had struck a new big lode of Acoustix, a lode which if worked successfully would see Larynx Incorporated become a far more powerful exporting concern than Interstellar Voice . Antlers Park didn't want that. It was he or his agents who placed those lens buttons in the Larynx barracks. For he knew that just as Jupiter's great spot was responsible for a climate and atmosphere suitable for an Earthman on this Eighth Moon, so also was that spot a deadly power in itself, capable when its rays were concentrated of causing a fatal sickness. Then suddenly becoming fearful of Grannie's prying, Antlers Park strove to head her off before she reached Shaft Four. He did head her off and managed to lure her and Baker and Xartal into the Shaft barracks where they would be exposed to the rays from the lens button. But Grannie only pretended to contract the plague. Park then attempted to outwit Ezra Karn and me by returning in Jimmy Baker's kite car with a cockatoo image of Grannie. I listened to all this in silence. "But," I said when she had finished, "how did Park manage to have that image created and why did the mine laborers walk out into the Baldric when they contracted the fever?" Grannie Annie frowned. "I'm not sure I can answer the first of those questions," she replied. "You must remember Antlers Park has been on this moon five years and during that time he must have acquainted himself with many of its secrets. Probably he learned long ago just what to do to make a cockatoo create a mental image. "As for the men going out into the Baldric, that was more of Park's diabolical work. In the walls of the barracks besides those lens buttons were also miniature electro-hypnotic plates, with the master controlling unit located in that valley. Park knew that when the miners were in a drugged condition from the effects of the fever they would be susceptible to the machine's lure.... And now, Billy-boy, are you coming with me?" "Coming with you?" I repeated. "Where?" The old lady lit a cigarette. "Pluto maybe," she said. "There's a penal colony there, you know, and that ought to tie in nicely with a new crime story. I can see it now ... prison break, stolen rocket ship, fugitives lurking in the interplanetary lanes...." "Grannie," I laughed. "You're incorrigible!"

What is the plot of the story?

3

The story starts three days into an expedition on Jupiter's Eighth Moon, led by Annabella C. Flowers, a science fiction author, known by her friends as Grannie Annie. Also in the group were some of her friends: the narrator Billy, the prospector Ezra Karn, and the Martian illustrator named Xartal. The moon was known for Acoustix, an ore that allows aging Martians to improve their supersonic telecommunication abilities. They traveled through the desert to an area called the Baldric, which was filled with cat-tail-like trees and silver cockatoo-like creatures. Antlers Park, the manager of Interstellar Voice (an Acoustix mining company) had told them about the area. As they continued on, the group had a shock: they saw duplicates of themselves traveling toward them. It was not a simple mirage, as they could hear the others talking. Once they got close, however, the doubles disappeared. Shaking off the odd situation, the group continued, and eventually ran into Jimmy Baker, the manager of Larynx Incorporated, the competitors of Interstellar Voice. It seemed Jimmy needed Grannie's help: his workers at the mine had been falling sick with Red Spot Fever, which made them wander into the Baldric. The group headed to the Larynx Incorporated offices, where Jimmy admitted that calling off the mining expedition would mean the end of Jimmy's company, so he needed to combat the Fever. Grannie grabbed supplies from Jimmy's laboratory and they headed to the desert with Xartal. Ezra and Billy stayed to look around the offices, and briefly talked to Antlers Park on the visiphone. He had less issue with the Fever, but had an antitoxin that he was willing to share with Jimmy. Through a camera on Jimmy's car, Billy was able to watch the group in the desert as another set of mirages appeared. Grannie excitedly realized that the cockatoos on the moon were copying Xartal's drawings, mimicking the mental images and causing these "mirages". Ezra and Billy headed to Jimmy's office to investigate reports, realizing that everyone fell sick in the barracks, not while mining. They found a lens in the barracks that was pushing concentrated rays towards the workers, so they ran to the visiscreen room to find out where Grannie was. They were surprised to see Antlers Park was the only person in the car with Grannie, Jimmy and Xartal nowhere to be seen. Ezra and Billy drove out to meet them, where Billy realized this was a cockatoo and not the actual Grannie. Antlers Park eventually gave up the information about where he had left Grannie and the others, and when Billy and Ezra found them, Grannie showed them the blue ultraviolet light that had been set up to counteract the red rays that cause the fever. It seemed that the lens amplifying the rays to cause the fever was placed in Jimmy's company's barracks by Antlers' company, and the Red Spot Fever was a plan to keep Jimmy's company from becoming more successful than Antlers'.

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Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net DOUBLE TROUBLE by CARL JACOBI Grannie Annie, that waspish science-fiction writer, was in a jam again. What with red-spot fever, talking cockatoos and flagpole trees, I was running in circles—especially since Grannie became twins every now and then. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] We had left the offices of Interstellar Voice three days ago, Earth time, and now as the immense disc of Jupiter flamed across the sky, entered the outer limits of the Baldric. Grannie Annie strode in the lead, her absurd long-skirted black dress looking as out of place in this desert as the trees. Flagpole trees. They rose straight up like enormous cat-tails, with only a melon-shaped protuberance at the top to show they were a form of vegetation. Everything else was blanketed by the sand and the powerful wind that blew from all quarters. As we reached the first of those trees, Grannie came to a halt. "This is the Baldric all right. If my calculations are right, we've hit it at its narrowest spot." Ezra Karn took a greasy pipe from his lips and spat. "It looks like the rest of this God-forsaken moon," he said, "'ceptin for them sticks." Xartal, the Martian illustrator, said nothing. He was like that, taciturn, speaking only when spoken to. He could be excused this time, however, for this was only our third day on Jupiter's Eighth Moon, and the country was still strange to us. When Annabella C. Flowers, that renowned writer of science fiction, visiphoned me at Crater City, Mars, to meet her here, I had thought she was crazy. But Miss Flowers, known to her friends as Grannie Annie, had always been mildly crazy. If you haven't read her books, you've missed something. She's the author of Lady of the Green Flames , Lady of the Runaway Planet , Lady of the Crimson Space-Beast , and other works of science fiction. Blood-and-thunder as these books are, however, they have one redeeming feature—authenticity of background. Grannie Annie was the original research digger-upper, and when she laid the setting of a yarn on a star of the sixth magnitude, only a transportation-velocity of less than light could prevent her from visiting her "stage" in person. Therefore when she asked me to meet her at the landing field of Interstellar Voice on Jupiter's Eighth Moon, I knew she had another novel in the state of embryo. What I didn't expect was Ezra Karn. He was an old prospector Grannie had met, and he had become so attached to the authoress he now followed her wherever she went. As for Xartal, he was a Martian and was slated to do the illustrations for Grannie's new book. Five minutes after my ship had blasted down, the four of us met in the offices of Interstellar Voice . And then I was shaking hands with Antlers Park, the manager of I. V. himself. "Glad to meet you," he said cordially. "I've just been trying to persuade Miss Flowers not to attempt a trip into the Baldric." "What's the Baldric?" I had asked. Antlers Park flicked the ash from his cheroot and shrugged. "Will you believe me, sir," he said, "when I tell you I've been out here on this forsaken moon five years and don't rightly know myself?" I scowled at that; it didn't make sense. "However, as you perhaps know, the only reason for colonial activities here at all is because of the presence of an ore known as Acoustix. It's no use to the people of Earth but of untold value on Mars. I'm not up on the scientific reasons, but it seems that life on the red planet has developed with a supersonic method of vocal communication. The Martian speaks as the Earthman does, but he amplifies his thoughts' transmission by way of wave lengths as high as three million vibrations per second. The trouble is that by the time the average Martian reaches middle age, his ability to produce those vibrations steadily decreases. Then it was found that this ore, Acoustix, revitalized their sounding apparatus, and the rush was on." "What do you mean?" Park leaned back. "The rush to find more of the ore," he explained. "But up until now this moon is the only place where it can be found. "There are two companies here," he continued, " Interstellar Voice and Larynx Incorporated . Chap by the name of Jimmy Baker runs that. However, the point is, between the properties of these two companies stretches a band or belt which has become known as the Baldric. "There are two principal forms of life in the Baldric; flagpole trees and a species of ornithoid resembling cockatoos. So far no one has crossed the Baldric without trouble." "What sort of trouble?" Grannie Annie had demanded. And when Antlers Park stuttered evasively, the old lady snorted, "Fiddlesticks, I never saw trouble yet that couldn't be explained. We leave in an hour." So now here we were at the outer reaches of the Baldric, four travelers on foot with only the barest necessities in the way of equipment and supplies. I walked forward to get a closer view of one of the flagpole trees. And then abruptly I saw something else. A queer-looking bird squatted there in the sand, looking up at me. Silver in plumage, it resembled a parrot with a crest; and yet it didn't. In some strange way the thing was a hideous caricature. "Look what I found," I yelled. "What I found," said the cockatoo in a very human voice. "Thunder, it talks," I said amazed. "Talks," repeated the bird, blinking its eyes. The cockatoo repeated my last statement again, then rose on its short legs, flapped its wings once and soared off into the sky. Xartal, the Martian illustrator, already had a notebook in his hands and was sketching a likeness of the creature. Ten minutes later we were on the move again. We saw more silver cockatoos and more flagpole trees. Above us, the great disc of Jupiter began to descend toward the horizon. And then all at once Grannie stopped again, this time at the top of a high ridge. She shielded her eyes and stared off into the plain we had just crossed. "Billy-boy," she said to me in a strange voice, "look down there and tell me what you see." I followed the direction of her hand and a shock went through me from head to foot. Down there, slowly toiling across the sand, advanced a party of four persons. In the lead was a little old lady in a black dress. Behind her strode a grizzled Earth man in a flop-brimmed hat, another Earth man, and a Martian. Detail for detail they were a duplicate of ourselves! "A mirage!" said Ezra Karn. But it wasn't a mirage. As the party came closer, we could see that their lips were moving, and their voices became audible. I listened in awe. The duplicate of myself was talking to the duplicate of Grannie Annie, and she was replying in the most natural way. Steadily the four travelers approached. Then, when a dozen yards away, they suddenly faded like a negative exposed to light and disappeared. "What do you make of it?" I said in a hushed voice. Grannie shook her head. "Might be a form of mass hypnosis superinduced by some chemical radiations," she replied. "Whatever it is, we'd better watch our step. There's no telling what might lie ahead." We walked after that with taut nerves and watchful eyes, but we saw no repetition of the "mirage." The wind continued to blow ceaselessly, and the sand seemed to grow more and more powdery. For some time I had fixed my gaze on a dot in the sky which I supposed to be a high-flying cockatoo. As that dot continued to move across the heavens in a single direction, I called Grannie's attention to it. "It's a kite," she nodded. "There should be a car attached to it somewhere." She offered no further explanation, but a quarter of an hour later as we topped another rise a curious elliptical car with a long slanting windscreen came into view. Attached to its hood was a taut wire which slanted up into the sky to connect with the kite. A man was driving and when he saw us, he waved. Five minutes later Grannie was shaking his hand vigorously and mumbling introductions. "This is Jimmy Baker," she said. "He manages Larynx Incorporated , and he's the real reason we're here." I decided I liked Baker the moment I saw him. In his middle thirties, he was tall and lean, with pleasant blue eyes which even his sand goggles could not conceal. "I can't tell you how glad I am you're here, Grannie," he said. "If anybody can help me, you can." Grannie's eyes glittered. "Trouble with the mine laborers?" she questioned. Jimmy Baker nodded. He told his story over the roar of the wind as we headed back across the desert. Occasionally he touched a stud on an electric windlass to which the kite wire was attached. Apparently these adjustments moved planes or fins on the kite and accounted for the car's ability to move in any direction. "If I weren't a realist, I'd say that Larynx Incorporated has been bewitched," he began slowly. "We pay our men high wages and give them excellent living conditions with a vacation on Callisto every year. Up until a short time ago most of them were in excellent health and spirits. Then the Red Spot Fever got them." "Red Spot Fever?" Grannie looked at him curiously. Jimmy Baker nodded. "The first symptoms are a tendency to garrulousness on the part of the patient. Then they disappear." He paused to make an adjustment of the windlass. "They walk out into the Baldric," he continued, "and nothing can stop them. We tried following them, of course, but it was no go. As soon as they realize they're being followed, they stop. But the moment our eyes are turned, they give us the slip." "But surely you must have some idea of where they go," Grannie said. Baker lit a cigarette. "There's all kinds of rumors," he replied, "but none of them will hold water. By the way, there's a cockatoo eyrie ahead of us." I followed his gaze and saw a curious structure suspended between a rude circle of flagpole trees. A strange web-like formation of translucent gauzy material, it was. Fully two hundred cockatoos were perched upon it. They watched us with their mild eyes as we passed, but they didn't move. After that we were rolling up the driveway that led to the offices of Larynx Incorporated . As Jimmy Baker led the way up the inclined ramp, a door in the central building opened, and a man emerged. His face was drawn. "Mr. Baker," he said breathlessly, "seventy-five workers at Shaft Four have headed out into the Baldric." Baker dropped his cigarette and ground his heel on it savagely. "Shaft Four, eh?" he repeated. "That's our principal mine. If the fever spreads there, I'm licked." He motioned us into his office and strode across to a desk. Silent Xartal, the Martian illustrator, took a chair in a corner and got his notebook out, sketching the room's interior. Grannie Annie remained standing. Presently the old lady walked across to the desk and helped herself to the bottle of Martian whiskey there. "There must be ways of stopping this," she said. "Have you called in any physicians? Why don't you call an enforced vacation and send the men away until the plague has died down?" Baker shook his head. "Three doctors from Callisto were here last month. They were as much at loss as I am. As for sending the men away, I may have to do that, but when I do, it means quits. Our company is chartered with Spacolonial, and you know what that means. Failure to produce during a period of thirty days or more, and you lose all rights." A visiphone bell sounded, and Baker walked across to the instrument. A man's face formed in the vision plate. Baker listened, said "Okay" and threw off the switch. "The entire crew of Shaft Four have gone out into the Baldric," he said slowly. There was a large map hanging on the wall back of Baker's desk. Grannie Annie walked across to it and began to study its markings. "Shaft Four is at the outer edge of the Baldric at a point where that corridor is at its widest," she said. Baker looked up. "That's right. We only began operations there a comparatively short time ago. Struck a rich vein of Acoustix that runs deep in. If that vein holds out, we'll double the output of Interstellar Voice , our rival, in a year." Grannie nodded. "I think you and I and Xartal had better take a run up there," she said. "But first I want to see your laboratory." There was no refusing her. Jimmy Baker led the way down to a lower level where a huge laboratory and experimental shop ran the length of the building. Grannie seized a light weight carry-case and began dropping articles into it. A pontocated glass lens, three or four Wellington radite bulbs, each with a spectroscopic filament, a small dynamo that would operate on a kite windlass, and a quantity of wire and other items. The kite car was brought out again, and the old woman, Baker and the Martian took their places in it. Then Jimmy waved, and the car began to roll down the ramp. Not until they had vanished in the desert haze did I sense the loneliness of this outpost. With that loneliness came a sudden sense of foreboding. Had I been a fool to let Grannie go? I thought of her, an old woman who should be in a rocking chair, knitting socks. If anything happened to Annabella C. Flowers, I would never forgive myself and neither would her millions of readers. Ezra Karn and I went back into the office. The old prospector chuckled. "Dang human dynamo. Got more energy than a runaway comet." A connecting door on the far side of the office opened onto a long corridor which ended at a staircase. "Let's look around," I said. We passed down the corridor and climbed the staircase to the second floor. Here were the general offices of Larynx Incorporated , and through glass doors I could see clerks busy with counting machines and report tapes. In another chamber the extremely light Acoustix ore was being packed into big cases and marked for shipment. At the far end a door to a small room stood open. Inside a young man was tilted back in a swivel chair before a complicated instrument panel. "C'mon in," he said, seeing us. "If you want a look at your friends, here they are." He flicked a stud, and the entire wall above the panel underwent a slow change of colors. Those colors whirled kaleidescopically, then coalesced into a three-dimensional scene. It was a scene of a rapidly unfolding desert country as seen from the rear of a kite car. Directly behind the windscreen, backs turned to me, were Jimmy Baker, Grannie, and Xartal. It was as if I were standing directly behind them. "It's Mr. Baker's own invention," the operator said. "An improvement on the visiphone." "Do you mean to say you can follow the movements of that car and its passengers wherever it goes? Can you hear them talk too?" "Sure." The operator turned another dial, and Grannie's falsetto voice entered the room. It stopped abruptly. "The machine uses a lot of power," the operator said, "and as yet we haven't got much." The cloud of anxiety which had wrapped itself about me disappeared somewhat as I viewed this device. At least I could now keep myself posted of Grannie's movements. Karn and I went down to the commissary where we ate our supper. When we returned to Jimmy Baker's office, the visiphone bell was ringing. I went over to it and turned it on, and to my surprise the face of Antlers Park flashed on the screen. "Hello," he said in his friendly way. "I see you arrived all right. Is Miss Flowers there?" "Miss Flowers left with Mr. Baker for Shaft Four," I said. "There's trouble up there. Red spot fever." "Fever, eh?" repeated Park. "That's a shame. Is there anything I can do?" "Tell me," I said, "has your company had any trouble with this plague?" "A little. But up until yesterday the fever's been confined to the other side of the Baldric. We had one partial case, but my chemists gave the chap an antitoxin that seems to have worked. Come to think of it, I might drive over to Shaft Four and give Jimmy Baker the formula. I haven't been out in the Baldric for years, but if you didn't have any trouble, I shouldn't either." We exchanged a few more pleasantries, and then he rang off. In exactly an hour I went upstairs to the visiscreen room. Then once more I was directly behind my friends, listening in on their conversation. The view through the windscreen showed an irregular array of flagpole trees, with the sky dotted by high-flying cockatoos. "There's an eyrie over there," Jimmy Baker was saying. "We might as well camp beside it." Moments later a rude circle of flagpole trees loomed ahead. Across the top of them was stretched a translucent web. Jimmy and Grannie got out of the car and began making camp. Xartal remained in his seat. He was drawing pictures on large pieces of pasteboard, and as I stood there in the visiscreen room, I watched him. There was no doubt about it, the Martian was clever. He would make a few rapid lines on one of the pasteboards, rub it a little to get the proper shading and then go on to the next. In swift rotation likenesses of Ezra Karn, of myself, of Jimmy Baker, and of Antlers Park took form. Ezra spoke over my shoulder. "He's doing scenes for Grannie's new book," he said. "The old lady figures on using the events here for a plot. Look at that damned nosy bird! " A silver cockatoo had alighted on the kite car and was surveying curiously Xartal's work. As each drawing was completed, the bird scanned it with rapt attention. Abruptly it flew to the top of the eyrie, where it seemed to be having a consultation with its bird companions. And then abruptly it happened. The cockatoos took off in mass flight. A group of Earth people suddenly materialized on the eyrie, talking and moving about as if it were the most natural thing in the world. With a shock I saw the likeness of myself; I saw Ezra Karn; and I saw the image of Jimmy Baker. The real Jimmy Baker stood next to Grannie, staring up at this incredible mirage. Grannie let out a whoop. "I've got it!" she said. "Those things we see up there are nothing more than mental images. They're Xartal's drawings!" "Don't you see," the lady continued. "Everything that Xartal put on paper has been seen by one or more of these cockatoos. The cockatoos are like Earth parrots all right, but not only have they the power of copying speech, they also have the ability to recreate a mental image of what they have seen. In other words their brains form a powerful photographic impression of the object. That impression is then transmitted simultaneously in telepathic wavelengths to common foci. That eyrie might be likened to a cinema screen, receiving brain vibrations from a hundred different sources that blend into the light field to form what are apparently three-dimensional images." The Larynx manager nodded slowly. "I see," he said. "But why don't the birds reconstruct images from the actual person. Why use drawings?" "Probably because the drawings are exaggerated in certain details and made a greater impression on their brains," Grannie replied. Up on the eyrie a strange performance was taking place. The duplicate of Grannie Annie was bowing to the duplicate of Jimmy Baker, and the image of Ezra Karn was playing leap frog with the image of Antlers Park. Then abruptly the screen before me blurred and went blank. "Sorry," the operator said. "I've used too much power already. Have to give the generators a chance to build it up again." Nodding, I turned and motioned to Karn. We went back downstairs. "That explains something at any rate," the old prospector said. "But how about that Red spot fever?" On Jimmy Baker's desk was a large file marked: FEVER VICTIMS. I opened it and found it contained the case histories of those men who had been attacked by the strange malady. Reading them over, I was struck by one detail. Each patient had received the first symptoms, not while working in the mines, but while sleeping or lounging in the barracks. Five minutes later Karn and I were striding down a white ramp that led to the nearest barracks. The building came into sight, a low rectangular structure, dome-roofed to withstand the violent winds. Inside double tiers of bunks stretched along either wall. In those bunks some thirty men lay sleeping. The far wall was taken up by a huge window of denvo-quartz. As I stood there, something suddenly caught Ezra Karn's eye. He began to walk toward that window. "Look here," he said. Six feet up on that window a small almost imperceptible button of dull metal had been wedged into an aperture cut in the quartz. The central part of the button appeared to be a powerful lens of some kind, and as I seized it and pulled it loose, I felt the hum of tiny clock work. All at once I had it! Red spot fever. Heat fever from the infra-red rays of Jupiter's great spot. Someone had constructed this lens to concentrate and amplify the power of those rays. The internal clockwork served a double purpose. It opened a shutter, and it rotated the lens slowly so that it played for a time on each of the sleeping men. I slid the metal button in my pocket and left the barracks at a run. Back in the visiscreen room, I snapped to the operator: "Turn it on!" The kite car swam into view in the screen above the instrument panel. I stared with open eyes. Jimmy Baker no longer was in the car, nor was Xartal, the Martian. Grannie Annie was there, but seated at the controls was Antlers Park, the manager of Interstellar Voice. Ezra Karn jabbed my elbow. "Grannie's coming back. I thought she'd be getting sick of this blamed moon." It didn't make sense. In all the years I'd known Annabella C. Flowers, never yet had I seen her desert a case until she had woven the clues and facts to a logical conclusion. "Ezra," I said, "we're going to drive out and meet them. There's something screwy here." Ten minutes later in another kite car we were driving at a fast clip through the powdery sands of the Baldric. And before long we saw another car approaching. It was Grannie. As the car drew up alongside I saw her sitting in her prim way next to Antlers Park. Park said: "We left the others at the mine. Miss Flowers is going back with me to my offices to help me improve the formula for that new antitoxin." He waved his hand, and the car moved off. I watched it as it sped across the desert, and a growing suspicion began to form in my mind. Then, like a knife thrust, the truth struck me. "Ezra!" I yelled, swinging the car. "That wasn't Grannie! That was one of those damned cockatoo images. We've got to catch him." The other car was some distance ahead now. Park looked back and saw us following. He did something to the kite wire, and his car leaped ahead. I threw the speed indicator hard over. Our kite was a huge box affair with a steady powerful pull to the connecting wire. Park's vehicle was drawn by a flat triangular kite that dove and fluttered with each variance of the wind. Steadily we began to close in. The manager of Interstellar Voice turned again, and something glinted in his hand. There was a flash of purple flame, and a round hole appeared in our windscreen inches above Karn's head. "Heat gun!" Ezra yelled. Now we were rocketing over the sand dunes, winding in and out between the flagpole trees. I had to catch that car I told myself. Grannie Annie's very life might be at stake, not to mention the lives of hundreds of mine workers. Again Park took aim and again a hole shattered our windscreen. The wind shifted and blew from another quarter. The box kite soared, but the triangular kite faltered. Taking advantage of Park's loss of speed, I raced alongside. The I. V. manager lifted his weapon frantically. But before he could use it a third time, Ezra Karn had whipped a lariat from his belt and sent it coiling across the intervening space. The thong yanked tight about the manager's throat. Park did the only thing he could do. He shut off power, and the two cars coasted to a halt. Then I was across in the other seat, wrenching the weapon free from his grasp. "What have you done with Miss Flowers?" I demanded. The manager's eyes glittered with fear as he saw my finger tense on the trigger. Weakly he lifted an arm and pointed to the northwest. "Val-ley. Thir-ty miles. Entrance hidden by wall of ... flagpole trees." I leaped into the driver's seat and gave the kite its head. And now the country began to undergo a subtle change. The trees seemed to group themselves in a long flanking corridor in a northwesterly direction, as if to hide some secret that lay beyond. Twice I attempted to penetrate that wall, only to find my way blocked by those curious growths. Then a corridor opened before me; a mile forward and the desert began again. But it was a new desert this time: the sand packed hard as granite, the way ahead utterly devoid of vegetation. In the distance black bulging hills extended to right and left, with a narrow chasm or doorway between. I headed for that entrance, and when I reached it, I shut off power with an exclamation of astonishment. There was a huge chair-shaped rock there, and seated upon it was Grannie Annie. She had a tablet in her hands, and she was writing. "Grannie!" I yelled. "What're you doing here? Where's Mr. Baker?" She rose to her feet and clambered down the rock. "Getting back Jimmy's mine laborers," she said, a twinkle in her eyes. "I see you've got Antlers Park. I'm glad of that. It saves me a lot of trouble." She took off her spectacles and wiped them on her sleeve. "Don't look so fuddled, Billy-boy. Come along, and I'll show you." She led the way through the narrow passage into the valley. A deep gorge, it was, with the black sheer cliffs on either side pressing close. Ten feet forward, I stopped short, staring in amazement. Advancing toward me like a column of infantry came a long line of Larynx miners. They walked slowly, looking straight ahead, moving down the center of the gorge toward the entrance. But there was more! A kite car was drawn up to the side. The windscreen had been removed, and mounted on the hood was a large bullet-like contrivance that looked not unlike a search lamp. A blinding shaft of bluish radiance spewed from its open end. Playing it back and forth upon the marching men were Jimmy Baker and Xartal, the Martian. "Ultra violet," Grannie Annie explained. "The opposite end of the vibratory scale and the only thing that will combat the infra-red rays that cause red spot fever. Those men won't stop walking until they've reached Shaft Four." Grannie Annie told her story during the long ride back to Shaft Four. We drove slowly, keeping the line of marching Larynx miners always ahead of us. Jimmy Baker had struck a new big lode of Acoustix, a lode which if worked successfully would see Larynx Incorporated become a far more powerful exporting concern than Interstellar Voice . Antlers Park didn't want that. It was he or his agents who placed those lens buttons in the Larynx barracks. For he knew that just as Jupiter's great spot was responsible for a climate and atmosphere suitable for an Earthman on this Eighth Moon, so also was that spot a deadly power in itself, capable when its rays were concentrated of causing a fatal sickness. Then suddenly becoming fearful of Grannie's prying, Antlers Park strove to head her off before she reached Shaft Four. He did head her off and managed to lure her and Baker and Xartal into the Shaft barracks where they would be exposed to the rays from the lens button. But Grannie only pretended to contract the plague. Park then attempted to outwit Ezra Karn and me by returning in Jimmy Baker's kite car with a cockatoo image of Grannie. I listened to all this in silence. "But," I said when she had finished, "how did Park manage to have that image created and why did the mine laborers walk out into the Baldric when they contracted the fever?" Grannie Annie frowned. "I'm not sure I can answer the first of those questions," she replied. "You must remember Antlers Park has been on this moon five years and during that time he must have acquainted himself with many of its secrets. Probably he learned long ago just what to do to make a cockatoo create a mental image. "As for the men going out into the Baldric, that was more of Park's diabolical work. In the walls of the barracks besides those lens buttons were also miniature electro-hypnotic plates, with the master controlling unit located in that valley. Park knew that when the miners were in a drugged condition from the effects of the fever they would be susceptible to the machine's lure.... And now, Billy-boy, are you coming with me?" "Coming with you?" I repeated. "Where?" The old lady lit a cigarette. "Pluto maybe," she said. "There's a penal colony there, you know, and that ought to tie in nicely with a new crime story. I can see it now ... prison break, stolen rocket ship, fugitives lurking in the interplanetary lanes...." "Grannie," I laughed. "You're incorrigible!"

What is the plot of the story?

8

Annabella C. Flowers, known as Grannie Annie, is a famed science fiction writer who summons the story's narrator, Billy, to join her on a mission to the 8th moon of Jupiter, where she ostensibly plans to observe the setting for her next novel. She also invites her constant companion, a prospector name Ezra Karn, and her illustrator, a Martian named Xartal. On the moon, the team unites at the offices of Interstellar Voice, a company managed by Antlers Park. Upon Billy's arrival, Antlers updates him on the history of the company; Interstellar Voice and their rival company Larynx Incorporated mine the moon for its resource of an ore called Acoustix, which is popular amongst Martians because of its ability to revitalize their supersonic vocalizations that dwindle around middle age. Between the properties of these two companies stretches a vast desert known as the Baldric, which is home to a bird-like species resembling cockatoos as well as flagpole trees. Grannie Annie plans to cross in order to further observe the moon's environment and make way to Larynx Incorporated. Antlers Park warns them vaguely of danger in the Baldric, but the team leaves anyway. During the course of their journey, they observe the cockatoos and discover their ability to mimic human voices. In addition, they discover an alarming visage--from their perch atop a high cliff, they see four travelers, seemingly themselves in exact 3D duplicate, walking along the same path they'd just traversed. After this odd discovery, they meet Jimmy Baker, who arrives in his car guided through the air attached to a kite, and Grannie Annie reveals the true purpose of their trip is to help Jimmy resolve the labor issues at his company, Larynx Incorporated. His workers have been stricken with Red-Spot Fever, which causes them to abandon their job and walk into the desert; Jimmy worries this will destroy his business. After Grannie Annie, Xartal, and Jimmy Baker leave to tour his company's laboratory and Shaft Four, Billy and Ezra stay behind and tour the offices of Larynx Incorporated. An employee shows them an updated visiphone from which they can view Grannie Annie's journey, and they witness them stopping by a cockatoo nest, where a cockatoo observes Xartal's drawings and uses its ability to mentally mimic images to recreate his drawings of the team in 3D just as they saw previously in the desert. When Billy and Ezra discover a device in the workers' bunker that has been used to spread Red-Spot Fever and see Grannie Annie is returning with Antlers Park, they rush to meet them. Billy realizes this isn’t the real Grannie Annie, but rather her 3D image, and they hurry to stop Antlers Park. After a chase, Antlers admits he set up the Red-Spot device in order to sabotage his business rival. When they reunite with Annie, she and Jimmy and Xartal are using ultra-violet rays to combat the infra-red rays that ignited the Red-Spot Fever in order to draw them back to Larynx Incorporated.

63442

Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net DOUBLE TROUBLE by CARL JACOBI Grannie Annie, that waspish science-fiction writer, was in a jam again. What with red-spot fever, talking cockatoos and flagpole trees, I was running in circles—especially since Grannie became twins every now and then. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] We had left the offices of Interstellar Voice three days ago, Earth time, and now as the immense disc of Jupiter flamed across the sky, entered the outer limits of the Baldric. Grannie Annie strode in the lead, her absurd long-skirted black dress looking as out of place in this desert as the trees. Flagpole trees. They rose straight up like enormous cat-tails, with only a melon-shaped protuberance at the top to show they were a form of vegetation. Everything else was blanketed by the sand and the powerful wind that blew from all quarters. As we reached the first of those trees, Grannie came to a halt. "This is the Baldric all right. If my calculations are right, we've hit it at its narrowest spot." Ezra Karn took a greasy pipe from his lips and spat. "It looks like the rest of this God-forsaken moon," he said, "'ceptin for them sticks." Xartal, the Martian illustrator, said nothing. He was like that, taciturn, speaking only when spoken to. He could be excused this time, however, for this was only our third day on Jupiter's Eighth Moon, and the country was still strange to us. When Annabella C. Flowers, that renowned writer of science fiction, visiphoned me at Crater City, Mars, to meet her here, I had thought she was crazy. But Miss Flowers, known to her friends as Grannie Annie, had always been mildly crazy. If you haven't read her books, you've missed something. She's the author of Lady of the Green Flames , Lady of the Runaway Planet , Lady of the Crimson Space-Beast , and other works of science fiction. Blood-and-thunder as these books are, however, they have one redeeming feature—authenticity of background. Grannie Annie was the original research digger-upper, and when she laid the setting of a yarn on a star of the sixth magnitude, only a transportation-velocity of less than light could prevent her from visiting her "stage" in person. Therefore when she asked me to meet her at the landing field of Interstellar Voice on Jupiter's Eighth Moon, I knew she had another novel in the state of embryo. What I didn't expect was Ezra Karn. He was an old prospector Grannie had met, and he had become so attached to the authoress he now followed her wherever she went. As for Xartal, he was a Martian and was slated to do the illustrations for Grannie's new book. Five minutes after my ship had blasted down, the four of us met in the offices of Interstellar Voice . And then I was shaking hands with Antlers Park, the manager of I. V. himself. "Glad to meet you," he said cordially. "I've just been trying to persuade Miss Flowers not to attempt a trip into the Baldric." "What's the Baldric?" I had asked. Antlers Park flicked the ash from his cheroot and shrugged. "Will you believe me, sir," he said, "when I tell you I've been out here on this forsaken moon five years and don't rightly know myself?" I scowled at that; it didn't make sense. "However, as you perhaps know, the only reason for colonial activities here at all is because of the presence of an ore known as Acoustix. It's no use to the people of Earth but of untold value on Mars. I'm not up on the scientific reasons, but it seems that life on the red planet has developed with a supersonic method of vocal communication. The Martian speaks as the Earthman does, but he amplifies his thoughts' transmission by way of wave lengths as high as three million vibrations per second. The trouble is that by the time the average Martian reaches middle age, his ability to produce those vibrations steadily decreases. Then it was found that this ore, Acoustix, revitalized their sounding apparatus, and the rush was on." "What do you mean?" Park leaned back. "The rush to find more of the ore," he explained. "But up until now this moon is the only place where it can be found. "There are two companies here," he continued, " Interstellar Voice and Larynx Incorporated . Chap by the name of Jimmy Baker runs that. However, the point is, between the properties of these two companies stretches a band or belt which has become known as the Baldric. "There are two principal forms of life in the Baldric; flagpole trees and a species of ornithoid resembling cockatoos. So far no one has crossed the Baldric without trouble." "What sort of trouble?" Grannie Annie had demanded. And when Antlers Park stuttered evasively, the old lady snorted, "Fiddlesticks, I never saw trouble yet that couldn't be explained. We leave in an hour." So now here we were at the outer reaches of the Baldric, four travelers on foot with only the barest necessities in the way of equipment and supplies. I walked forward to get a closer view of one of the flagpole trees. And then abruptly I saw something else. A queer-looking bird squatted there in the sand, looking up at me. Silver in plumage, it resembled a parrot with a crest; and yet it didn't. In some strange way the thing was a hideous caricature. "Look what I found," I yelled. "What I found," said the cockatoo in a very human voice. "Thunder, it talks," I said amazed. "Talks," repeated the bird, blinking its eyes. The cockatoo repeated my last statement again, then rose on its short legs, flapped its wings once and soared off into the sky. Xartal, the Martian illustrator, already had a notebook in his hands and was sketching a likeness of the creature. Ten minutes later we were on the move again. We saw more silver cockatoos and more flagpole trees. Above us, the great disc of Jupiter began to descend toward the horizon. And then all at once Grannie stopped again, this time at the top of a high ridge. She shielded her eyes and stared off into the plain we had just crossed. "Billy-boy," she said to me in a strange voice, "look down there and tell me what you see." I followed the direction of her hand and a shock went through me from head to foot. Down there, slowly toiling across the sand, advanced a party of four persons. In the lead was a little old lady in a black dress. Behind her strode a grizzled Earth man in a flop-brimmed hat, another Earth man, and a Martian. Detail for detail they were a duplicate of ourselves! "A mirage!" said Ezra Karn. But it wasn't a mirage. As the party came closer, we could see that their lips were moving, and their voices became audible. I listened in awe. The duplicate of myself was talking to the duplicate of Grannie Annie, and she was replying in the most natural way. Steadily the four travelers approached. Then, when a dozen yards away, they suddenly faded like a negative exposed to light and disappeared. "What do you make of it?" I said in a hushed voice. Grannie shook her head. "Might be a form of mass hypnosis superinduced by some chemical radiations," she replied. "Whatever it is, we'd better watch our step. There's no telling what might lie ahead." We walked after that with taut nerves and watchful eyes, but we saw no repetition of the "mirage." The wind continued to blow ceaselessly, and the sand seemed to grow more and more powdery. For some time I had fixed my gaze on a dot in the sky which I supposed to be a high-flying cockatoo. As that dot continued to move across the heavens in a single direction, I called Grannie's attention to it. "It's a kite," she nodded. "There should be a car attached to it somewhere." She offered no further explanation, but a quarter of an hour later as we topped another rise a curious elliptical car with a long slanting windscreen came into view. Attached to its hood was a taut wire which slanted up into the sky to connect with the kite. A man was driving and when he saw us, he waved. Five minutes later Grannie was shaking his hand vigorously and mumbling introductions. "This is Jimmy Baker," she said. "He manages Larynx Incorporated , and he's the real reason we're here." I decided I liked Baker the moment I saw him. In his middle thirties, he was tall and lean, with pleasant blue eyes which even his sand goggles could not conceal. "I can't tell you how glad I am you're here, Grannie," he said. "If anybody can help me, you can." Grannie's eyes glittered. "Trouble with the mine laborers?" she questioned. Jimmy Baker nodded. He told his story over the roar of the wind as we headed back across the desert. Occasionally he touched a stud on an electric windlass to which the kite wire was attached. Apparently these adjustments moved planes or fins on the kite and accounted for the car's ability to move in any direction. "If I weren't a realist, I'd say that Larynx Incorporated has been bewitched," he began slowly. "We pay our men high wages and give them excellent living conditions with a vacation on Callisto every year. Up until a short time ago most of them were in excellent health and spirits. Then the Red Spot Fever got them." "Red Spot Fever?" Grannie looked at him curiously. Jimmy Baker nodded. "The first symptoms are a tendency to garrulousness on the part of the patient. Then they disappear." He paused to make an adjustment of the windlass. "They walk out into the Baldric," he continued, "and nothing can stop them. We tried following them, of course, but it was no go. As soon as they realize they're being followed, they stop. But the moment our eyes are turned, they give us the slip." "But surely you must have some idea of where they go," Grannie said. Baker lit a cigarette. "There's all kinds of rumors," he replied, "but none of them will hold water. By the way, there's a cockatoo eyrie ahead of us." I followed his gaze and saw a curious structure suspended between a rude circle of flagpole trees. A strange web-like formation of translucent gauzy material, it was. Fully two hundred cockatoos were perched upon it. They watched us with their mild eyes as we passed, but they didn't move. After that we were rolling up the driveway that led to the offices of Larynx Incorporated . As Jimmy Baker led the way up the inclined ramp, a door in the central building opened, and a man emerged. His face was drawn. "Mr. Baker," he said breathlessly, "seventy-five workers at Shaft Four have headed out into the Baldric." Baker dropped his cigarette and ground his heel on it savagely. "Shaft Four, eh?" he repeated. "That's our principal mine. If the fever spreads there, I'm licked." He motioned us into his office and strode across to a desk. Silent Xartal, the Martian illustrator, took a chair in a corner and got his notebook out, sketching the room's interior. Grannie Annie remained standing. Presently the old lady walked across to the desk and helped herself to the bottle of Martian whiskey there. "There must be ways of stopping this," she said. "Have you called in any physicians? Why don't you call an enforced vacation and send the men away until the plague has died down?" Baker shook his head. "Three doctors from Callisto were here last month. They were as much at loss as I am. As for sending the men away, I may have to do that, but when I do, it means quits. Our company is chartered with Spacolonial, and you know what that means. Failure to produce during a period of thirty days or more, and you lose all rights." A visiphone bell sounded, and Baker walked across to the instrument. A man's face formed in the vision plate. Baker listened, said "Okay" and threw off the switch. "The entire crew of Shaft Four have gone out into the Baldric," he said slowly. There was a large map hanging on the wall back of Baker's desk. Grannie Annie walked across to it and began to study its markings. "Shaft Four is at the outer edge of the Baldric at a point where that corridor is at its widest," she said. Baker looked up. "That's right. We only began operations there a comparatively short time ago. Struck a rich vein of Acoustix that runs deep in. If that vein holds out, we'll double the output of Interstellar Voice , our rival, in a year." Grannie nodded. "I think you and I and Xartal had better take a run up there," she said. "But first I want to see your laboratory." There was no refusing her. Jimmy Baker led the way down to a lower level where a huge laboratory and experimental shop ran the length of the building. Grannie seized a light weight carry-case and began dropping articles into it. A pontocated glass lens, three or four Wellington radite bulbs, each with a spectroscopic filament, a small dynamo that would operate on a kite windlass, and a quantity of wire and other items. The kite car was brought out again, and the old woman, Baker and the Martian took their places in it. Then Jimmy waved, and the car began to roll down the ramp. Not until they had vanished in the desert haze did I sense the loneliness of this outpost. With that loneliness came a sudden sense of foreboding. Had I been a fool to let Grannie go? I thought of her, an old woman who should be in a rocking chair, knitting socks. If anything happened to Annabella C. Flowers, I would never forgive myself and neither would her millions of readers. Ezra Karn and I went back into the office. The old prospector chuckled. "Dang human dynamo. Got more energy than a runaway comet." A connecting door on the far side of the office opened onto a long corridor which ended at a staircase. "Let's look around," I said. We passed down the corridor and climbed the staircase to the second floor. Here were the general offices of Larynx Incorporated , and through glass doors I could see clerks busy with counting machines and report tapes. In another chamber the extremely light Acoustix ore was being packed into big cases and marked for shipment. At the far end a door to a small room stood open. Inside a young man was tilted back in a swivel chair before a complicated instrument panel. "C'mon in," he said, seeing us. "If you want a look at your friends, here they are." He flicked a stud, and the entire wall above the panel underwent a slow change of colors. Those colors whirled kaleidescopically, then coalesced into a three-dimensional scene. It was a scene of a rapidly unfolding desert country as seen from the rear of a kite car. Directly behind the windscreen, backs turned to me, were Jimmy Baker, Grannie, and Xartal. It was as if I were standing directly behind them. "It's Mr. Baker's own invention," the operator said. "An improvement on the visiphone." "Do you mean to say you can follow the movements of that car and its passengers wherever it goes? Can you hear them talk too?" "Sure." The operator turned another dial, and Grannie's falsetto voice entered the room. It stopped abruptly. "The machine uses a lot of power," the operator said, "and as yet we haven't got much." The cloud of anxiety which had wrapped itself about me disappeared somewhat as I viewed this device. At least I could now keep myself posted of Grannie's movements. Karn and I went down to the commissary where we ate our supper. When we returned to Jimmy Baker's office, the visiphone bell was ringing. I went over to it and turned it on, and to my surprise the face of Antlers Park flashed on the screen. "Hello," he said in his friendly way. "I see you arrived all right. Is Miss Flowers there?" "Miss Flowers left with Mr. Baker for Shaft Four," I said. "There's trouble up there. Red spot fever." "Fever, eh?" repeated Park. "That's a shame. Is there anything I can do?" "Tell me," I said, "has your company had any trouble with this plague?" "A little. But up until yesterday the fever's been confined to the other side of the Baldric. We had one partial case, but my chemists gave the chap an antitoxin that seems to have worked. Come to think of it, I might drive over to Shaft Four and give Jimmy Baker the formula. I haven't been out in the Baldric for years, but if you didn't have any trouble, I shouldn't either." We exchanged a few more pleasantries, and then he rang off. In exactly an hour I went upstairs to the visiscreen room. Then once more I was directly behind my friends, listening in on their conversation. The view through the windscreen showed an irregular array of flagpole trees, with the sky dotted by high-flying cockatoos. "There's an eyrie over there," Jimmy Baker was saying. "We might as well camp beside it." Moments later a rude circle of flagpole trees loomed ahead. Across the top of them was stretched a translucent web. Jimmy and Grannie got out of the car and began making camp. Xartal remained in his seat. He was drawing pictures on large pieces of pasteboard, and as I stood there in the visiscreen room, I watched him. There was no doubt about it, the Martian was clever. He would make a few rapid lines on one of the pasteboards, rub it a little to get the proper shading and then go on to the next. In swift rotation likenesses of Ezra Karn, of myself, of Jimmy Baker, and of Antlers Park took form. Ezra spoke over my shoulder. "He's doing scenes for Grannie's new book," he said. "The old lady figures on using the events here for a plot. Look at that damned nosy bird! " A silver cockatoo had alighted on the kite car and was surveying curiously Xartal's work. As each drawing was completed, the bird scanned it with rapt attention. Abruptly it flew to the top of the eyrie, where it seemed to be having a consultation with its bird companions. And then abruptly it happened. The cockatoos took off in mass flight. A group of Earth people suddenly materialized on the eyrie, talking and moving about as if it were the most natural thing in the world. With a shock I saw the likeness of myself; I saw Ezra Karn; and I saw the image of Jimmy Baker. The real Jimmy Baker stood next to Grannie, staring up at this incredible mirage. Grannie let out a whoop. "I've got it!" she said. "Those things we see up there are nothing more than mental images. They're Xartal's drawings!" "Don't you see," the lady continued. "Everything that Xartal put on paper has been seen by one or more of these cockatoos. The cockatoos are like Earth parrots all right, but not only have they the power of copying speech, they also have the ability to recreate a mental image of what they have seen. In other words their brains form a powerful photographic impression of the object. That impression is then transmitted simultaneously in telepathic wavelengths to common foci. That eyrie might be likened to a cinema screen, receiving brain vibrations from a hundred different sources that blend into the light field to form what are apparently three-dimensional images." The Larynx manager nodded slowly. "I see," he said. "But why don't the birds reconstruct images from the actual person. Why use drawings?" "Probably because the drawings are exaggerated in certain details and made a greater impression on their brains," Grannie replied. Up on the eyrie a strange performance was taking place. The duplicate of Grannie Annie was bowing to the duplicate of Jimmy Baker, and the image of Ezra Karn was playing leap frog with the image of Antlers Park. Then abruptly the screen before me blurred and went blank. "Sorry," the operator said. "I've used too much power already. Have to give the generators a chance to build it up again." Nodding, I turned and motioned to Karn. We went back downstairs. "That explains something at any rate," the old prospector said. "But how about that Red spot fever?" On Jimmy Baker's desk was a large file marked: FEVER VICTIMS. I opened it and found it contained the case histories of those men who had been attacked by the strange malady. Reading them over, I was struck by one detail. Each patient had received the first symptoms, not while working in the mines, but while sleeping or lounging in the barracks. Five minutes later Karn and I were striding down a white ramp that led to the nearest barracks. The building came into sight, a low rectangular structure, dome-roofed to withstand the violent winds. Inside double tiers of bunks stretched along either wall. In those bunks some thirty men lay sleeping. The far wall was taken up by a huge window of denvo-quartz. As I stood there, something suddenly caught Ezra Karn's eye. He began to walk toward that window. "Look here," he said. Six feet up on that window a small almost imperceptible button of dull metal had been wedged into an aperture cut in the quartz. The central part of the button appeared to be a powerful lens of some kind, and as I seized it and pulled it loose, I felt the hum of tiny clock work. All at once I had it! Red spot fever. Heat fever from the infra-red rays of Jupiter's great spot. Someone had constructed this lens to concentrate and amplify the power of those rays. The internal clockwork served a double purpose. It opened a shutter, and it rotated the lens slowly so that it played for a time on each of the sleeping men. I slid the metal button in my pocket and left the barracks at a run. Back in the visiscreen room, I snapped to the operator: "Turn it on!" The kite car swam into view in the screen above the instrument panel. I stared with open eyes. Jimmy Baker no longer was in the car, nor was Xartal, the Martian. Grannie Annie was there, but seated at the controls was Antlers Park, the manager of Interstellar Voice. Ezra Karn jabbed my elbow. "Grannie's coming back. I thought she'd be getting sick of this blamed moon." It didn't make sense. In all the years I'd known Annabella C. Flowers, never yet had I seen her desert a case until she had woven the clues and facts to a logical conclusion. "Ezra," I said, "we're going to drive out and meet them. There's something screwy here." Ten minutes later in another kite car we were driving at a fast clip through the powdery sands of the Baldric. And before long we saw another car approaching. It was Grannie. As the car drew up alongside I saw her sitting in her prim way next to Antlers Park. Park said: "We left the others at the mine. Miss Flowers is going back with me to my offices to help me improve the formula for that new antitoxin." He waved his hand, and the car moved off. I watched it as it sped across the desert, and a growing suspicion began to form in my mind. Then, like a knife thrust, the truth struck me. "Ezra!" I yelled, swinging the car. "That wasn't Grannie! That was one of those damned cockatoo images. We've got to catch him." The other car was some distance ahead now. Park looked back and saw us following. He did something to the kite wire, and his car leaped ahead. I threw the speed indicator hard over. Our kite was a huge box affair with a steady powerful pull to the connecting wire. Park's vehicle was drawn by a flat triangular kite that dove and fluttered with each variance of the wind. Steadily we began to close in. The manager of Interstellar Voice turned again, and something glinted in his hand. There was a flash of purple flame, and a round hole appeared in our windscreen inches above Karn's head. "Heat gun!" Ezra yelled. Now we were rocketing over the sand dunes, winding in and out between the flagpole trees. I had to catch that car I told myself. Grannie Annie's very life might be at stake, not to mention the lives of hundreds of mine workers. Again Park took aim and again a hole shattered our windscreen. The wind shifted and blew from another quarter. The box kite soared, but the triangular kite faltered. Taking advantage of Park's loss of speed, I raced alongside. The I. V. manager lifted his weapon frantically. But before he could use it a third time, Ezra Karn had whipped a lariat from his belt and sent it coiling across the intervening space. The thong yanked tight about the manager's throat. Park did the only thing he could do. He shut off power, and the two cars coasted to a halt. Then I was across in the other seat, wrenching the weapon free from his grasp. "What have you done with Miss Flowers?" I demanded. The manager's eyes glittered with fear as he saw my finger tense on the trigger. Weakly he lifted an arm and pointed to the northwest. "Val-ley. Thir-ty miles. Entrance hidden by wall of ... flagpole trees." I leaped into the driver's seat and gave the kite its head. And now the country began to undergo a subtle change. The trees seemed to group themselves in a long flanking corridor in a northwesterly direction, as if to hide some secret that lay beyond. Twice I attempted to penetrate that wall, only to find my way blocked by those curious growths. Then a corridor opened before me; a mile forward and the desert began again. But it was a new desert this time: the sand packed hard as granite, the way ahead utterly devoid of vegetation. In the distance black bulging hills extended to right and left, with a narrow chasm or doorway between. I headed for that entrance, and when I reached it, I shut off power with an exclamation of astonishment. There was a huge chair-shaped rock there, and seated upon it was Grannie Annie. She had a tablet in her hands, and she was writing. "Grannie!" I yelled. "What're you doing here? Where's Mr. Baker?" She rose to her feet and clambered down the rock. "Getting back Jimmy's mine laborers," she said, a twinkle in her eyes. "I see you've got Antlers Park. I'm glad of that. It saves me a lot of trouble." She took off her spectacles and wiped them on her sleeve. "Don't look so fuddled, Billy-boy. Come along, and I'll show you." She led the way through the narrow passage into the valley. A deep gorge, it was, with the black sheer cliffs on either side pressing close. Ten feet forward, I stopped short, staring in amazement. Advancing toward me like a column of infantry came a long line of Larynx miners. They walked slowly, looking straight ahead, moving down the center of the gorge toward the entrance. But there was more! A kite car was drawn up to the side. The windscreen had been removed, and mounted on the hood was a large bullet-like contrivance that looked not unlike a search lamp. A blinding shaft of bluish radiance spewed from its open end. Playing it back and forth upon the marching men were Jimmy Baker and Xartal, the Martian. "Ultra violet," Grannie Annie explained. "The opposite end of the vibratory scale and the only thing that will combat the infra-red rays that cause red spot fever. Those men won't stop walking until they've reached Shaft Four." Grannie Annie told her story during the long ride back to Shaft Four. We drove slowly, keeping the line of marching Larynx miners always ahead of us. Jimmy Baker had struck a new big lode of Acoustix, a lode which if worked successfully would see Larynx Incorporated become a far more powerful exporting concern than Interstellar Voice . Antlers Park didn't want that. It was he or his agents who placed those lens buttons in the Larynx barracks. For he knew that just as Jupiter's great spot was responsible for a climate and atmosphere suitable for an Earthman on this Eighth Moon, so also was that spot a deadly power in itself, capable when its rays were concentrated of causing a fatal sickness. Then suddenly becoming fearful of Grannie's prying, Antlers Park strove to head her off before she reached Shaft Four. He did head her off and managed to lure her and Baker and Xartal into the Shaft barracks where they would be exposed to the rays from the lens button. But Grannie only pretended to contract the plague. Park then attempted to outwit Ezra Karn and me by returning in Jimmy Baker's kite car with a cockatoo image of Grannie. I listened to all this in silence. "But," I said when she had finished, "how did Park manage to have that image created and why did the mine laborers walk out into the Baldric when they contracted the fever?" Grannie Annie frowned. "I'm not sure I can answer the first of those questions," she replied. "You must remember Antlers Park has been on this moon five years and during that time he must have acquainted himself with many of its secrets. Probably he learned long ago just what to do to make a cockatoo create a mental image. "As for the men going out into the Baldric, that was more of Park's diabolical work. In the walls of the barracks besides those lens buttons were also miniature electro-hypnotic plates, with the master controlling unit located in that valley. Park knew that when the miners were in a drugged condition from the effects of the fever they would be susceptible to the machine's lure.... And now, Billy-boy, are you coming with me?" "Coming with you?" I repeated. "Where?" The old lady lit a cigarette. "Pluto maybe," she said. "There's a penal colony there, you know, and that ought to tie in nicely with a new crime story. I can see it now ... prison break, stolen rocket ship, fugitives lurking in the interplanetary lanes...." "Grannie," I laughed. "You're incorrigible!"

What is the plot of the story?

1

Grannie Annie, Ezra Karn, and Billy-Boy are on Jupiter’s Eighth Moon. Xartal, a Martian, is also there to draw illustrations for Grannie Annie’s book. The group meets with Antlers Park, the manager of Interstellar Voice, and he tells them about the Baldric, a stretch of land that connects his company, Interstellar Voice, with Larynx Incorporated. The two companies are competing to harvest Acoustix. Acoustix is an ore that amplifies Martians’ thoughts so that they can continue to speak to Earthmen even in their old age when their ability to produce vibrations diminishes. Park warns that the Baldric is dangerous, but Annie is undeterred. Annie, Ezra, Billy, and Xartal arrive at the Baldric and spot a cockatoo. Xartal draws the creature and the group members in his notebook. Moments later, Annie spots four figures that look just like herself and her crew members walking on the other side of the hill. The apparent mirage disappears quickly. Billy sees a kite car, and minutes later Jimmy Baker, the manager of Larynx Incorporated, approaches the group. His company is in trouble because a lot of its workers have come down with Red Spot Fever. The workers become talkative and then they walk out into the Baldric. Annie, Jimmy, and Xartal head out to investigate. Billy and Ezra stay behind, and they check out an invention of Jimmy’s - a three-dimensional screen that makes them feel like they’re right there with their group members. They speak to Park on the contraption, and he says that he will give Jimmy the antidote to Red Spot Fever. Billy spots his own likeness on the screen, and he’s shocked. Annie tells the others that the cockatoos are looking at Xartal’s drawings and projecting their mental images of his pictures. Billy realizes that all of the workers become sick when they’re in their barracks, not when they’re in the mines. At the barracks, Ezra finds a piece of metal with a lens on the wall. The infra-red rays from Jupiter are causing the plague; the lens was put there to amplify those rays, and they sicken the sleeping workers. Billy and Ezra return to the screen and see Park driving a kite car with Annie by his side. While the men follow Park’s car, he tries to shoot at them. He fails, and Ezra uses a tool to grab Park by the throat. Billy and Ezra find Annie and hundreds of Jimmy’s workers. The group has set up a large ultraviolet light that works to fight the infra-red rays that cause the fever. It was Park all along who was forcing the men to become sick because he did not want Jimmy’s company to be competitive. Park had tried to get Grannie Annie sick as well, but he ended up taking her duplicate image in the kite car instead of the real one.

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Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net DOUBLE TROUBLE by CARL JACOBI Grannie Annie, that waspish science-fiction writer, was in a jam again. What with red-spot fever, talking cockatoos and flagpole trees, I was running in circles—especially since Grannie became twins every now and then. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] We had left the offices of Interstellar Voice three days ago, Earth time, and now as the immense disc of Jupiter flamed across the sky, entered the outer limits of the Baldric. Grannie Annie strode in the lead, her absurd long-skirted black dress looking as out of place in this desert as the trees. Flagpole trees. They rose straight up like enormous cat-tails, with only a melon-shaped protuberance at the top to show they were a form of vegetation. Everything else was blanketed by the sand and the powerful wind that blew from all quarters. As we reached the first of those trees, Grannie came to a halt. "This is the Baldric all right. If my calculations are right, we've hit it at its narrowest spot." Ezra Karn took a greasy pipe from his lips and spat. "It looks like the rest of this God-forsaken moon," he said, "'ceptin for them sticks." Xartal, the Martian illustrator, said nothing. He was like that, taciturn, speaking only when spoken to. He could be excused this time, however, for this was only our third day on Jupiter's Eighth Moon, and the country was still strange to us. When Annabella C. Flowers, that renowned writer of science fiction, visiphoned me at Crater City, Mars, to meet her here, I had thought she was crazy. But Miss Flowers, known to her friends as Grannie Annie, had always been mildly crazy. If you haven't read her books, you've missed something. She's the author of Lady of the Green Flames , Lady of the Runaway Planet , Lady of the Crimson Space-Beast , and other works of science fiction. Blood-and-thunder as these books are, however, they have one redeeming feature—authenticity of background. Grannie Annie was the original research digger-upper, and when she laid the setting of a yarn on a star of the sixth magnitude, only a transportation-velocity of less than light could prevent her from visiting her "stage" in person. Therefore when she asked me to meet her at the landing field of Interstellar Voice on Jupiter's Eighth Moon, I knew she had another novel in the state of embryo. What I didn't expect was Ezra Karn. He was an old prospector Grannie had met, and he had become so attached to the authoress he now followed her wherever she went. As for Xartal, he was a Martian and was slated to do the illustrations for Grannie's new book. Five minutes after my ship had blasted down, the four of us met in the offices of Interstellar Voice . And then I was shaking hands with Antlers Park, the manager of I. V. himself. "Glad to meet you," he said cordially. "I've just been trying to persuade Miss Flowers not to attempt a trip into the Baldric." "What's the Baldric?" I had asked. Antlers Park flicked the ash from his cheroot and shrugged. "Will you believe me, sir," he said, "when I tell you I've been out here on this forsaken moon five years and don't rightly know myself?" I scowled at that; it didn't make sense. "However, as you perhaps know, the only reason for colonial activities here at all is because of the presence of an ore known as Acoustix. It's no use to the people of Earth but of untold value on Mars. I'm not up on the scientific reasons, but it seems that life on the red planet has developed with a supersonic method of vocal communication. The Martian speaks as the Earthman does, but he amplifies his thoughts' transmission by way of wave lengths as high as three million vibrations per second. The trouble is that by the time the average Martian reaches middle age, his ability to produce those vibrations steadily decreases. Then it was found that this ore, Acoustix, revitalized their sounding apparatus, and the rush was on." "What do you mean?" Park leaned back. "The rush to find more of the ore," he explained. "But up until now this moon is the only place where it can be found. "There are two companies here," he continued, " Interstellar Voice and Larynx Incorporated . Chap by the name of Jimmy Baker runs that. However, the point is, between the properties of these two companies stretches a band or belt which has become known as the Baldric. "There are two principal forms of life in the Baldric; flagpole trees and a species of ornithoid resembling cockatoos. So far no one has crossed the Baldric without trouble." "What sort of trouble?" Grannie Annie had demanded. And when Antlers Park stuttered evasively, the old lady snorted, "Fiddlesticks, I never saw trouble yet that couldn't be explained. We leave in an hour." So now here we were at the outer reaches of the Baldric, four travelers on foot with only the barest necessities in the way of equipment and supplies. I walked forward to get a closer view of one of the flagpole trees. And then abruptly I saw something else. A queer-looking bird squatted there in the sand, looking up at me. Silver in plumage, it resembled a parrot with a crest; and yet it didn't. In some strange way the thing was a hideous caricature. "Look what I found," I yelled. "What I found," said the cockatoo in a very human voice. "Thunder, it talks," I said amazed. "Talks," repeated the bird, blinking its eyes. The cockatoo repeated my last statement again, then rose on its short legs, flapped its wings once and soared off into the sky. Xartal, the Martian illustrator, already had a notebook in his hands and was sketching a likeness of the creature. Ten minutes later we were on the move again. We saw more silver cockatoos and more flagpole trees. Above us, the great disc of Jupiter began to descend toward the horizon. And then all at once Grannie stopped again, this time at the top of a high ridge. She shielded her eyes and stared off into the plain we had just crossed. "Billy-boy," she said to me in a strange voice, "look down there and tell me what you see." I followed the direction of her hand and a shock went through me from head to foot. Down there, slowly toiling across the sand, advanced a party of four persons. In the lead was a little old lady in a black dress. Behind her strode a grizzled Earth man in a flop-brimmed hat, another Earth man, and a Martian. Detail for detail they were a duplicate of ourselves! "A mirage!" said Ezra Karn. But it wasn't a mirage. As the party came closer, we could see that their lips were moving, and their voices became audible. I listened in awe. The duplicate of myself was talking to the duplicate of Grannie Annie, and she was replying in the most natural way. Steadily the four travelers approached. Then, when a dozen yards away, they suddenly faded like a negative exposed to light and disappeared. "What do you make of it?" I said in a hushed voice. Grannie shook her head. "Might be a form of mass hypnosis superinduced by some chemical radiations," she replied. "Whatever it is, we'd better watch our step. There's no telling what might lie ahead." We walked after that with taut nerves and watchful eyes, but we saw no repetition of the "mirage." The wind continued to blow ceaselessly, and the sand seemed to grow more and more powdery. For some time I had fixed my gaze on a dot in the sky which I supposed to be a high-flying cockatoo. As that dot continued to move across the heavens in a single direction, I called Grannie's attention to it. "It's a kite," she nodded. "There should be a car attached to it somewhere." She offered no further explanation, but a quarter of an hour later as we topped another rise a curious elliptical car with a long slanting windscreen came into view. Attached to its hood was a taut wire which slanted up into the sky to connect with the kite. A man was driving and when he saw us, he waved. Five minutes later Grannie was shaking his hand vigorously and mumbling introductions. "This is Jimmy Baker," she said. "He manages Larynx Incorporated , and he's the real reason we're here." I decided I liked Baker the moment I saw him. In his middle thirties, he was tall and lean, with pleasant blue eyes which even his sand goggles could not conceal. "I can't tell you how glad I am you're here, Grannie," he said. "If anybody can help me, you can." Grannie's eyes glittered. "Trouble with the mine laborers?" she questioned. Jimmy Baker nodded. He told his story over the roar of the wind as we headed back across the desert. Occasionally he touched a stud on an electric windlass to which the kite wire was attached. Apparently these adjustments moved planes or fins on the kite and accounted for the car's ability to move in any direction. "If I weren't a realist, I'd say that Larynx Incorporated has been bewitched," he began slowly. "We pay our men high wages and give them excellent living conditions with a vacation on Callisto every year. Up until a short time ago most of them were in excellent health and spirits. Then the Red Spot Fever got them." "Red Spot Fever?" Grannie looked at him curiously. Jimmy Baker nodded. "The first symptoms are a tendency to garrulousness on the part of the patient. Then they disappear." He paused to make an adjustment of the windlass. "They walk out into the Baldric," he continued, "and nothing can stop them. We tried following them, of course, but it was no go. As soon as they realize they're being followed, they stop. But the moment our eyes are turned, they give us the slip." "But surely you must have some idea of where they go," Grannie said. Baker lit a cigarette. "There's all kinds of rumors," he replied, "but none of them will hold water. By the way, there's a cockatoo eyrie ahead of us." I followed his gaze and saw a curious structure suspended between a rude circle of flagpole trees. A strange web-like formation of translucent gauzy material, it was. Fully two hundred cockatoos were perched upon it. They watched us with their mild eyes as we passed, but they didn't move. After that we were rolling up the driveway that led to the offices of Larynx Incorporated . As Jimmy Baker led the way up the inclined ramp, a door in the central building opened, and a man emerged. His face was drawn. "Mr. Baker," he said breathlessly, "seventy-five workers at Shaft Four have headed out into the Baldric." Baker dropped his cigarette and ground his heel on it savagely. "Shaft Four, eh?" he repeated. "That's our principal mine. If the fever spreads there, I'm licked." He motioned us into his office and strode across to a desk. Silent Xartal, the Martian illustrator, took a chair in a corner and got his notebook out, sketching the room's interior. Grannie Annie remained standing. Presently the old lady walked across to the desk and helped herself to the bottle of Martian whiskey there. "There must be ways of stopping this," she said. "Have you called in any physicians? Why don't you call an enforced vacation and send the men away until the plague has died down?" Baker shook his head. "Three doctors from Callisto were here last month. They were as much at loss as I am. As for sending the men away, I may have to do that, but when I do, it means quits. Our company is chartered with Spacolonial, and you know what that means. Failure to produce during a period of thirty days or more, and you lose all rights." A visiphone bell sounded, and Baker walked across to the instrument. A man's face formed in the vision plate. Baker listened, said "Okay" and threw off the switch. "The entire crew of Shaft Four have gone out into the Baldric," he said slowly. There was a large map hanging on the wall back of Baker's desk. Grannie Annie walked across to it and began to study its markings. "Shaft Four is at the outer edge of the Baldric at a point where that corridor is at its widest," she said. Baker looked up. "That's right. We only began operations there a comparatively short time ago. Struck a rich vein of Acoustix that runs deep in. If that vein holds out, we'll double the output of Interstellar Voice , our rival, in a year." Grannie nodded. "I think you and I and Xartal had better take a run up there," she said. "But first I want to see your laboratory." There was no refusing her. Jimmy Baker led the way down to a lower level where a huge laboratory and experimental shop ran the length of the building. Grannie seized a light weight carry-case and began dropping articles into it. A pontocated glass lens, three or four Wellington radite bulbs, each with a spectroscopic filament, a small dynamo that would operate on a kite windlass, and a quantity of wire and other items. The kite car was brought out again, and the old woman, Baker and the Martian took their places in it. Then Jimmy waved, and the car began to roll down the ramp. Not until they had vanished in the desert haze did I sense the loneliness of this outpost. With that loneliness came a sudden sense of foreboding. Had I been a fool to let Grannie go? I thought of her, an old woman who should be in a rocking chair, knitting socks. If anything happened to Annabella C. Flowers, I would never forgive myself and neither would her millions of readers. Ezra Karn and I went back into the office. The old prospector chuckled. "Dang human dynamo. Got more energy than a runaway comet." A connecting door on the far side of the office opened onto a long corridor which ended at a staircase. "Let's look around," I said. We passed down the corridor and climbed the staircase to the second floor. Here were the general offices of Larynx Incorporated , and through glass doors I could see clerks busy with counting machines and report tapes. In another chamber the extremely light Acoustix ore was being packed into big cases and marked for shipment. At the far end a door to a small room stood open. Inside a young man was tilted back in a swivel chair before a complicated instrument panel. "C'mon in," he said, seeing us. "If you want a look at your friends, here they are." He flicked a stud, and the entire wall above the panel underwent a slow change of colors. Those colors whirled kaleidescopically, then coalesced into a three-dimensional scene. It was a scene of a rapidly unfolding desert country as seen from the rear of a kite car. Directly behind the windscreen, backs turned to me, were Jimmy Baker, Grannie, and Xartal. It was as if I were standing directly behind them. "It's Mr. Baker's own invention," the operator said. "An improvement on the visiphone." "Do you mean to say you can follow the movements of that car and its passengers wherever it goes? Can you hear them talk too?" "Sure." The operator turned another dial, and Grannie's falsetto voice entered the room. It stopped abruptly. "The machine uses a lot of power," the operator said, "and as yet we haven't got much." The cloud of anxiety which had wrapped itself about me disappeared somewhat as I viewed this device. At least I could now keep myself posted of Grannie's movements. Karn and I went down to the commissary where we ate our supper. When we returned to Jimmy Baker's office, the visiphone bell was ringing. I went over to it and turned it on, and to my surprise the face of Antlers Park flashed on the screen. "Hello," he said in his friendly way. "I see you arrived all right. Is Miss Flowers there?" "Miss Flowers left with Mr. Baker for Shaft Four," I said. "There's trouble up there. Red spot fever." "Fever, eh?" repeated Park. "That's a shame. Is there anything I can do?" "Tell me," I said, "has your company had any trouble with this plague?" "A little. But up until yesterday the fever's been confined to the other side of the Baldric. We had one partial case, but my chemists gave the chap an antitoxin that seems to have worked. Come to think of it, I might drive over to Shaft Four and give Jimmy Baker the formula. I haven't been out in the Baldric for years, but if you didn't have any trouble, I shouldn't either." We exchanged a few more pleasantries, and then he rang off. In exactly an hour I went upstairs to the visiscreen room. Then once more I was directly behind my friends, listening in on their conversation. The view through the windscreen showed an irregular array of flagpole trees, with the sky dotted by high-flying cockatoos. "There's an eyrie over there," Jimmy Baker was saying. "We might as well camp beside it." Moments later a rude circle of flagpole trees loomed ahead. Across the top of them was stretched a translucent web. Jimmy and Grannie got out of the car and began making camp. Xartal remained in his seat. He was drawing pictures on large pieces of pasteboard, and as I stood there in the visiscreen room, I watched him. There was no doubt about it, the Martian was clever. He would make a few rapid lines on one of the pasteboards, rub it a little to get the proper shading and then go on to the next. In swift rotation likenesses of Ezra Karn, of myself, of Jimmy Baker, and of Antlers Park took form. Ezra spoke over my shoulder. "He's doing scenes for Grannie's new book," he said. "The old lady figures on using the events here for a plot. Look at that damned nosy bird! " A silver cockatoo had alighted on the kite car and was surveying curiously Xartal's work. As each drawing was completed, the bird scanned it with rapt attention. Abruptly it flew to the top of the eyrie, where it seemed to be having a consultation with its bird companions. And then abruptly it happened. The cockatoos took off in mass flight. A group of Earth people suddenly materialized on the eyrie, talking and moving about as if it were the most natural thing in the world. With a shock I saw the likeness of myself; I saw Ezra Karn; and I saw the image of Jimmy Baker. The real Jimmy Baker stood next to Grannie, staring up at this incredible mirage. Grannie let out a whoop. "I've got it!" she said. "Those things we see up there are nothing more than mental images. They're Xartal's drawings!" "Don't you see," the lady continued. "Everything that Xartal put on paper has been seen by one or more of these cockatoos. The cockatoos are like Earth parrots all right, but not only have they the power of copying speech, they also have the ability to recreate a mental image of what they have seen. In other words their brains form a powerful photographic impression of the object. That impression is then transmitted simultaneously in telepathic wavelengths to common foci. That eyrie might be likened to a cinema screen, receiving brain vibrations from a hundred different sources that blend into the light field to form what are apparently three-dimensional images." The Larynx manager nodded slowly. "I see," he said. "But why don't the birds reconstruct images from the actual person. Why use drawings?" "Probably because the drawings are exaggerated in certain details and made a greater impression on their brains," Grannie replied. Up on the eyrie a strange performance was taking place. The duplicate of Grannie Annie was bowing to the duplicate of Jimmy Baker, and the image of Ezra Karn was playing leap frog with the image of Antlers Park. Then abruptly the screen before me blurred and went blank. "Sorry," the operator said. "I've used too much power already. Have to give the generators a chance to build it up again." Nodding, I turned and motioned to Karn. We went back downstairs. "That explains something at any rate," the old prospector said. "But how about that Red spot fever?" On Jimmy Baker's desk was a large file marked: FEVER VICTIMS. I opened it and found it contained the case histories of those men who had been attacked by the strange malady. Reading them over, I was struck by one detail. Each patient had received the first symptoms, not while working in the mines, but while sleeping or lounging in the barracks. Five minutes later Karn and I were striding down a white ramp that led to the nearest barracks. The building came into sight, a low rectangular structure, dome-roofed to withstand the violent winds. Inside double tiers of bunks stretched along either wall. In those bunks some thirty men lay sleeping. The far wall was taken up by a huge window of denvo-quartz. As I stood there, something suddenly caught Ezra Karn's eye. He began to walk toward that window. "Look here," he said. Six feet up on that window a small almost imperceptible button of dull metal had been wedged into an aperture cut in the quartz. The central part of the button appeared to be a powerful lens of some kind, and as I seized it and pulled it loose, I felt the hum of tiny clock work. All at once I had it! Red spot fever. Heat fever from the infra-red rays of Jupiter's great spot. Someone had constructed this lens to concentrate and amplify the power of those rays. The internal clockwork served a double purpose. It opened a shutter, and it rotated the lens slowly so that it played for a time on each of the sleeping men. I slid the metal button in my pocket and left the barracks at a run. Back in the visiscreen room, I snapped to the operator: "Turn it on!" The kite car swam into view in the screen above the instrument panel. I stared with open eyes. Jimmy Baker no longer was in the car, nor was Xartal, the Martian. Grannie Annie was there, but seated at the controls was Antlers Park, the manager of Interstellar Voice. Ezra Karn jabbed my elbow. "Grannie's coming back. I thought she'd be getting sick of this blamed moon." It didn't make sense. In all the years I'd known Annabella C. Flowers, never yet had I seen her desert a case until she had woven the clues and facts to a logical conclusion. "Ezra," I said, "we're going to drive out and meet them. There's something screwy here." Ten minutes later in another kite car we were driving at a fast clip through the powdery sands of the Baldric. And before long we saw another car approaching. It was Grannie. As the car drew up alongside I saw her sitting in her prim way next to Antlers Park. Park said: "We left the others at the mine. Miss Flowers is going back with me to my offices to help me improve the formula for that new antitoxin." He waved his hand, and the car moved off. I watched it as it sped across the desert, and a growing suspicion began to form in my mind. Then, like a knife thrust, the truth struck me. "Ezra!" I yelled, swinging the car. "That wasn't Grannie! That was one of those damned cockatoo images. We've got to catch him." The other car was some distance ahead now. Park looked back and saw us following. He did something to the kite wire, and his car leaped ahead. I threw the speed indicator hard over. Our kite was a huge box affair with a steady powerful pull to the connecting wire. Park's vehicle was drawn by a flat triangular kite that dove and fluttered with each variance of the wind. Steadily we began to close in. The manager of Interstellar Voice turned again, and something glinted in his hand. There was a flash of purple flame, and a round hole appeared in our windscreen inches above Karn's head. "Heat gun!" Ezra yelled. Now we were rocketing over the sand dunes, winding in and out between the flagpole trees. I had to catch that car I told myself. Grannie Annie's very life might be at stake, not to mention the lives of hundreds of mine workers. Again Park took aim and again a hole shattered our windscreen. The wind shifted and blew from another quarter. The box kite soared, but the triangular kite faltered. Taking advantage of Park's loss of speed, I raced alongside. The I. V. manager lifted his weapon frantically. But before he could use it a third time, Ezra Karn had whipped a lariat from his belt and sent it coiling across the intervening space. The thong yanked tight about the manager's throat. Park did the only thing he could do. He shut off power, and the two cars coasted to a halt. Then I was across in the other seat, wrenching the weapon free from his grasp. "What have you done with Miss Flowers?" I demanded. The manager's eyes glittered with fear as he saw my finger tense on the trigger. Weakly he lifted an arm and pointed to the northwest. "Val-ley. Thir-ty miles. Entrance hidden by wall of ... flagpole trees." I leaped into the driver's seat and gave the kite its head. And now the country began to undergo a subtle change. The trees seemed to group themselves in a long flanking corridor in a northwesterly direction, as if to hide some secret that lay beyond. Twice I attempted to penetrate that wall, only to find my way blocked by those curious growths. Then a corridor opened before me; a mile forward and the desert began again. But it was a new desert this time: the sand packed hard as granite, the way ahead utterly devoid of vegetation. In the distance black bulging hills extended to right and left, with a narrow chasm or doorway between. I headed for that entrance, and when I reached it, I shut off power with an exclamation of astonishment. There was a huge chair-shaped rock there, and seated upon it was Grannie Annie. She had a tablet in her hands, and she was writing. "Grannie!" I yelled. "What're you doing here? Where's Mr. Baker?" She rose to her feet and clambered down the rock. "Getting back Jimmy's mine laborers," she said, a twinkle in her eyes. "I see you've got Antlers Park. I'm glad of that. It saves me a lot of trouble." She took off her spectacles and wiped them on her sleeve. "Don't look so fuddled, Billy-boy. Come along, and I'll show you." She led the way through the narrow passage into the valley. A deep gorge, it was, with the black sheer cliffs on either side pressing close. Ten feet forward, I stopped short, staring in amazement. Advancing toward me like a column of infantry came a long line of Larynx miners. They walked slowly, looking straight ahead, moving down the center of the gorge toward the entrance. But there was more! A kite car was drawn up to the side. The windscreen had been removed, and mounted on the hood was a large bullet-like contrivance that looked not unlike a search lamp. A blinding shaft of bluish radiance spewed from its open end. Playing it back and forth upon the marching men were Jimmy Baker and Xartal, the Martian. "Ultra violet," Grannie Annie explained. "The opposite end of the vibratory scale and the only thing that will combat the infra-red rays that cause red spot fever. Those men won't stop walking until they've reached Shaft Four." Grannie Annie told her story during the long ride back to Shaft Four. We drove slowly, keeping the line of marching Larynx miners always ahead of us. Jimmy Baker had struck a new big lode of Acoustix, a lode which if worked successfully would see Larynx Incorporated become a far more powerful exporting concern than Interstellar Voice . Antlers Park didn't want that. It was he or his agents who placed those lens buttons in the Larynx barracks. For he knew that just as Jupiter's great spot was responsible for a climate and atmosphere suitable for an Earthman on this Eighth Moon, so also was that spot a deadly power in itself, capable when its rays were concentrated of causing a fatal sickness. Then suddenly becoming fearful of Grannie's prying, Antlers Park strove to head her off before she reached Shaft Four. He did head her off and managed to lure her and Baker and Xartal into the Shaft barracks where they would be exposed to the rays from the lens button. But Grannie only pretended to contract the plague. Park then attempted to outwit Ezra Karn and me by returning in Jimmy Baker's kite car with a cockatoo image of Grannie. I listened to all this in silence. "But," I said when she had finished, "how did Park manage to have that image created and why did the mine laborers walk out into the Baldric when they contracted the fever?" Grannie Annie frowned. "I'm not sure I can answer the first of those questions," she replied. "You must remember Antlers Park has been on this moon five years and during that time he must have acquainted himself with many of its secrets. Probably he learned long ago just what to do to make a cockatoo create a mental image. "As for the men going out into the Baldric, that was more of Park's diabolical work. In the walls of the barracks besides those lens buttons were also miniature electro-hypnotic plates, with the master controlling unit located in that valley. Park knew that when the miners were in a drugged condition from the effects of the fever they would be susceptible to the machine's lure.... And now, Billy-boy, are you coming with me?" "Coming with you?" I repeated. "Where?" The old lady lit a cigarette. "Pluto maybe," she said. "There's a penal colony there, you know, and that ought to tie in nicely with a new crime story. I can see it now ... prison break, stolen rocket ship, fugitives lurking in the interplanetary lanes...." "Grannie," I laughed. "You're incorrigible!"

What settings does the story take place in?

10

In the buildings of Interstellar Voice and Larynx Incorporated, two Acoustix ore mining companies on Jupiter’s eighth moon. The Baldric - the largely deserted space between the mining grounds of Interstellar Voice and Larynx Incorporated. It is a desert-like place with trees that are trunks with melon-shaped tops, and silver birds that can repeat English phrases as well as mimic human forms that appear like mirages. There is also a deep valley gorge within the desert and many eyries which seem similar to oases. There are several scenes aboard kite-propelled cars in the Baldric, as well as visiphone-like video feed of Jimmy’s car that is viewed from the offices of Larynx Incorporated. Shaft Four is one of the locations that Larynx Incorporated mines in on the border of the Baldric, which is talked about often, but is never actually visited by the main characters during the story.

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Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net DOUBLE TROUBLE by CARL JACOBI Grannie Annie, that waspish science-fiction writer, was in a jam again. What with red-spot fever, talking cockatoos and flagpole trees, I was running in circles—especially since Grannie became twins every now and then. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] We had left the offices of Interstellar Voice three days ago, Earth time, and now as the immense disc of Jupiter flamed across the sky, entered the outer limits of the Baldric. Grannie Annie strode in the lead, her absurd long-skirted black dress looking as out of place in this desert as the trees. Flagpole trees. They rose straight up like enormous cat-tails, with only a melon-shaped protuberance at the top to show they were a form of vegetation. Everything else was blanketed by the sand and the powerful wind that blew from all quarters. As we reached the first of those trees, Grannie came to a halt. "This is the Baldric all right. If my calculations are right, we've hit it at its narrowest spot." Ezra Karn took a greasy pipe from his lips and spat. "It looks like the rest of this God-forsaken moon," he said, "'ceptin for them sticks." Xartal, the Martian illustrator, said nothing. He was like that, taciturn, speaking only when spoken to. He could be excused this time, however, for this was only our third day on Jupiter's Eighth Moon, and the country was still strange to us. When Annabella C. Flowers, that renowned writer of science fiction, visiphoned me at Crater City, Mars, to meet her here, I had thought she was crazy. But Miss Flowers, known to her friends as Grannie Annie, had always been mildly crazy. If you haven't read her books, you've missed something. She's the author of Lady of the Green Flames , Lady of the Runaway Planet , Lady of the Crimson Space-Beast , and other works of science fiction. Blood-and-thunder as these books are, however, they have one redeeming feature—authenticity of background. Grannie Annie was the original research digger-upper, and when she laid the setting of a yarn on a star of the sixth magnitude, only a transportation-velocity of less than light could prevent her from visiting her "stage" in person. Therefore when she asked me to meet her at the landing field of Interstellar Voice on Jupiter's Eighth Moon, I knew she had another novel in the state of embryo. What I didn't expect was Ezra Karn. He was an old prospector Grannie had met, and he had become so attached to the authoress he now followed her wherever she went. As for Xartal, he was a Martian and was slated to do the illustrations for Grannie's new book. Five minutes after my ship had blasted down, the four of us met in the offices of Interstellar Voice . And then I was shaking hands with Antlers Park, the manager of I. V. himself. "Glad to meet you," he said cordially. "I've just been trying to persuade Miss Flowers not to attempt a trip into the Baldric." "What's the Baldric?" I had asked. Antlers Park flicked the ash from his cheroot and shrugged. "Will you believe me, sir," he said, "when I tell you I've been out here on this forsaken moon five years and don't rightly know myself?" I scowled at that; it didn't make sense. "However, as you perhaps know, the only reason for colonial activities here at all is because of the presence of an ore known as Acoustix. It's no use to the people of Earth but of untold value on Mars. I'm not up on the scientific reasons, but it seems that life on the red planet has developed with a supersonic method of vocal communication. The Martian speaks as the Earthman does, but he amplifies his thoughts' transmission by way of wave lengths as high as three million vibrations per second. The trouble is that by the time the average Martian reaches middle age, his ability to produce those vibrations steadily decreases. Then it was found that this ore, Acoustix, revitalized their sounding apparatus, and the rush was on." "What do you mean?" Park leaned back. "The rush to find more of the ore," he explained. "But up until now this moon is the only place where it can be found. "There are two companies here," he continued, " Interstellar Voice and Larynx Incorporated . Chap by the name of Jimmy Baker runs that. However, the point is, between the properties of these two companies stretches a band or belt which has become known as the Baldric. "There are two principal forms of life in the Baldric; flagpole trees and a species of ornithoid resembling cockatoos. So far no one has crossed the Baldric without trouble." "What sort of trouble?" Grannie Annie had demanded. And when Antlers Park stuttered evasively, the old lady snorted, "Fiddlesticks, I never saw trouble yet that couldn't be explained. We leave in an hour." So now here we were at the outer reaches of the Baldric, four travelers on foot with only the barest necessities in the way of equipment and supplies. I walked forward to get a closer view of one of the flagpole trees. And then abruptly I saw something else. A queer-looking bird squatted there in the sand, looking up at me. Silver in plumage, it resembled a parrot with a crest; and yet it didn't. In some strange way the thing was a hideous caricature. "Look what I found," I yelled. "What I found," said the cockatoo in a very human voice. "Thunder, it talks," I said amazed. "Talks," repeated the bird, blinking its eyes. The cockatoo repeated my last statement again, then rose on its short legs, flapped its wings once and soared off into the sky. Xartal, the Martian illustrator, already had a notebook in his hands and was sketching a likeness of the creature. Ten minutes later we were on the move again. We saw more silver cockatoos and more flagpole trees. Above us, the great disc of Jupiter began to descend toward the horizon. And then all at once Grannie stopped again, this time at the top of a high ridge. She shielded her eyes and stared off into the plain we had just crossed. "Billy-boy," she said to me in a strange voice, "look down there and tell me what you see." I followed the direction of her hand and a shock went through me from head to foot. Down there, slowly toiling across the sand, advanced a party of four persons. In the lead was a little old lady in a black dress. Behind her strode a grizzled Earth man in a flop-brimmed hat, another Earth man, and a Martian. Detail for detail they were a duplicate of ourselves! "A mirage!" said Ezra Karn. But it wasn't a mirage. As the party came closer, we could see that their lips were moving, and their voices became audible. I listened in awe. The duplicate of myself was talking to the duplicate of Grannie Annie, and she was replying in the most natural way. Steadily the four travelers approached. Then, when a dozen yards away, they suddenly faded like a negative exposed to light and disappeared. "What do you make of it?" I said in a hushed voice. Grannie shook her head. "Might be a form of mass hypnosis superinduced by some chemical radiations," she replied. "Whatever it is, we'd better watch our step. There's no telling what might lie ahead." We walked after that with taut nerves and watchful eyes, but we saw no repetition of the "mirage." The wind continued to blow ceaselessly, and the sand seemed to grow more and more powdery. For some time I had fixed my gaze on a dot in the sky which I supposed to be a high-flying cockatoo. As that dot continued to move across the heavens in a single direction, I called Grannie's attention to it. "It's a kite," she nodded. "There should be a car attached to it somewhere." She offered no further explanation, but a quarter of an hour later as we topped another rise a curious elliptical car with a long slanting windscreen came into view. Attached to its hood was a taut wire which slanted up into the sky to connect with the kite. A man was driving and when he saw us, he waved. Five minutes later Grannie was shaking his hand vigorously and mumbling introductions. "This is Jimmy Baker," she said. "He manages Larynx Incorporated , and he's the real reason we're here." I decided I liked Baker the moment I saw him. In his middle thirties, he was tall and lean, with pleasant blue eyes which even his sand goggles could not conceal. "I can't tell you how glad I am you're here, Grannie," he said. "If anybody can help me, you can." Grannie's eyes glittered. "Trouble with the mine laborers?" she questioned. Jimmy Baker nodded. He told his story over the roar of the wind as we headed back across the desert. Occasionally he touched a stud on an electric windlass to which the kite wire was attached. Apparently these adjustments moved planes or fins on the kite and accounted for the car's ability to move in any direction. "If I weren't a realist, I'd say that Larynx Incorporated has been bewitched," he began slowly. "We pay our men high wages and give them excellent living conditions with a vacation on Callisto every year. Up until a short time ago most of them were in excellent health and spirits. Then the Red Spot Fever got them." "Red Spot Fever?" Grannie looked at him curiously. Jimmy Baker nodded. "The first symptoms are a tendency to garrulousness on the part of the patient. Then they disappear." He paused to make an adjustment of the windlass. "They walk out into the Baldric," he continued, "and nothing can stop them. We tried following them, of course, but it was no go. As soon as they realize they're being followed, they stop. But the moment our eyes are turned, they give us the slip." "But surely you must have some idea of where they go," Grannie said. Baker lit a cigarette. "There's all kinds of rumors," he replied, "but none of them will hold water. By the way, there's a cockatoo eyrie ahead of us." I followed his gaze and saw a curious structure suspended between a rude circle of flagpole trees. A strange web-like formation of translucent gauzy material, it was. Fully two hundred cockatoos were perched upon it. They watched us with their mild eyes as we passed, but they didn't move. After that we were rolling up the driveway that led to the offices of Larynx Incorporated . As Jimmy Baker led the way up the inclined ramp, a door in the central building opened, and a man emerged. His face was drawn. "Mr. Baker," he said breathlessly, "seventy-five workers at Shaft Four have headed out into the Baldric." Baker dropped his cigarette and ground his heel on it savagely. "Shaft Four, eh?" he repeated. "That's our principal mine. If the fever spreads there, I'm licked." He motioned us into his office and strode across to a desk. Silent Xartal, the Martian illustrator, took a chair in a corner and got his notebook out, sketching the room's interior. Grannie Annie remained standing. Presently the old lady walked across to the desk and helped herself to the bottle of Martian whiskey there. "There must be ways of stopping this," she said. "Have you called in any physicians? Why don't you call an enforced vacation and send the men away until the plague has died down?" Baker shook his head. "Three doctors from Callisto were here last month. They were as much at loss as I am. As for sending the men away, I may have to do that, but when I do, it means quits. Our company is chartered with Spacolonial, and you know what that means. Failure to produce during a period of thirty days or more, and you lose all rights." A visiphone bell sounded, and Baker walked across to the instrument. A man's face formed in the vision plate. Baker listened, said "Okay" and threw off the switch. "The entire crew of Shaft Four have gone out into the Baldric," he said slowly. There was a large map hanging on the wall back of Baker's desk. Grannie Annie walked across to it and began to study its markings. "Shaft Four is at the outer edge of the Baldric at a point where that corridor is at its widest," she said. Baker looked up. "That's right. We only began operations there a comparatively short time ago. Struck a rich vein of Acoustix that runs deep in. If that vein holds out, we'll double the output of Interstellar Voice , our rival, in a year." Grannie nodded. "I think you and I and Xartal had better take a run up there," she said. "But first I want to see your laboratory." There was no refusing her. Jimmy Baker led the way down to a lower level where a huge laboratory and experimental shop ran the length of the building. Grannie seized a light weight carry-case and began dropping articles into it. A pontocated glass lens, three or four Wellington radite bulbs, each with a spectroscopic filament, a small dynamo that would operate on a kite windlass, and a quantity of wire and other items. The kite car was brought out again, and the old woman, Baker and the Martian took their places in it. Then Jimmy waved, and the car began to roll down the ramp. Not until they had vanished in the desert haze did I sense the loneliness of this outpost. With that loneliness came a sudden sense of foreboding. Had I been a fool to let Grannie go? I thought of her, an old woman who should be in a rocking chair, knitting socks. If anything happened to Annabella C. Flowers, I would never forgive myself and neither would her millions of readers. Ezra Karn and I went back into the office. The old prospector chuckled. "Dang human dynamo. Got more energy than a runaway comet." A connecting door on the far side of the office opened onto a long corridor which ended at a staircase. "Let's look around," I said. We passed down the corridor and climbed the staircase to the second floor. Here were the general offices of Larynx Incorporated , and through glass doors I could see clerks busy with counting machines and report tapes. In another chamber the extremely light Acoustix ore was being packed into big cases and marked for shipment. At the far end a door to a small room stood open. Inside a young man was tilted back in a swivel chair before a complicated instrument panel. "C'mon in," he said, seeing us. "If you want a look at your friends, here they are." He flicked a stud, and the entire wall above the panel underwent a slow change of colors. Those colors whirled kaleidescopically, then coalesced into a three-dimensional scene. It was a scene of a rapidly unfolding desert country as seen from the rear of a kite car. Directly behind the windscreen, backs turned to me, were Jimmy Baker, Grannie, and Xartal. It was as if I were standing directly behind them. "It's Mr. Baker's own invention," the operator said. "An improvement on the visiphone." "Do you mean to say you can follow the movements of that car and its passengers wherever it goes? Can you hear them talk too?" "Sure." The operator turned another dial, and Grannie's falsetto voice entered the room. It stopped abruptly. "The machine uses a lot of power," the operator said, "and as yet we haven't got much." The cloud of anxiety which had wrapped itself about me disappeared somewhat as I viewed this device. At least I could now keep myself posted of Grannie's movements. Karn and I went down to the commissary where we ate our supper. When we returned to Jimmy Baker's office, the visiphone bell was ringing. I went over to it and turned it on, and to my surprise the face of Antlers Park flashed on the screen. "Hello," he said in his friendly way. "I see you arrived all right. Is Miss Flowers there?" "Miss Flowers left with Mr. Baker for Shaft Four," I said. "There's trouble up there. Red spot fever." "Fever, eh?" repeated Park. "That's a shame. Is there anything I can do?" "Tell me," I said, "has your company had any trouble with this plague?" "A little. But up until yesterday the fever's been confined to the other side of the Baldric. We had one partial case, but my chemists gave the chap an antitoxin that seems to have worked. Come to think of it, I might drive over to Shaft Four and give Jimmy Baker the formula. I haven't been out in the Baldric for years, but if you didn't have any trouble, I shouldn't either." We exchanged a few more pleasantries, and then he rang off. In exactly an hour I went upstairs to the visiscreen room. Then once more I was directly behind my friends, listening in on their conversation. The view through the windscreen showed an irregular array of flagpole trees, with the sky dotted by high-flying cockatoos. "There's an eyrie over there," Jimmy Baker was saying. "We might as well camp beside it." Moments later a rude circle of flagpole trees loomed ahead. Across the top of them was stretched a translucent web. Jimmy and Grannie got out of the car and began making camp. Xartal remained in his seat. He was drawing pictures on large pieces of pasteboard, and as I stood there in the visiscreen room, I watched him. There was no doubt about it, the Martian was clever. He would make a few rapid lines on one of the pasteboards, rub it a little to get the proper shading and then go on to the next. In swift rotation likenesses of Ezra Karn, of myself, of Jimmy Baker, and of Antlers Park took form. Ezra spoke over my shoulder. "He's doing scenes for Grannie's new book," he said. "The old lady figures on using the events here for a plot. Look at that damned nosy bird! " A silver cockatoo had alighted on the kite car and was surveying curiously Xartal's work. As each drawing was completed, the bird scanned it with rapt attention. Abruptly it flew to the top of the eyrie, where it seemed to be having a consultation with its bird companions. And then abruptly it happened. The cockatoos took off in mass flight. A group of Earth people suddenly materialized on the eyrie, talking and moving about as if it were the most natural thing in the world. With a shock I saw the likeness of myself; I saw Ezra Karn; and I saw the image of Jimmy Baker. The real Jimmy Baker stood next to Grannie, staring up at this incredible mirage. Grannie let out a whoop. "I've got it!" she said. "Those things we see up there are nothing more than mental images. They're Xartal's drawings!" "Don't you see," the lady continued. "Everything that Xartal put on paper has been seen by one or more of these cockatoos. The cockatoos are like Earth parrots all right, but not only have they the power of copying speech, they also have the ability to recreate a mental image of what they have seen. In other words their brains form a powerful photographic impression of the object. That impression is then transmitted simultaneously in telepathic wavelengths to common foci. That eyrie might be likened to a cinema screen, receiving brain vibrations from a hundred different sources that blend into the light field to form what are apparently three-dimensional images." The Larynx manager nodded slowly. "I see," he said. "But why don't the birds reconstruct images from the actual person. Why use drawings?" "Probably because the drawings are exaggerated in certain details and made a greater impression on their brains," Grannie replied. Up on the eyrie a strange performance was taking place. The duplicate of Grannie Annie was bowing to the duplicate of Jimmy Baker, and the image of Ezra Karn was playing leap frog with the image of Antlers Park. Then abruptly the screen before me blurred and went blank. "Sorry," the operator said. "I've used too much power already. Have to give the generators a chance to build it up again." Nodding, I turned and motioned to Karn. We went back downstairs. "That explains something at any rate," the old prospector said. "But how about that Red spot fever?" On Jimmy Baker's desk was a large file marked: FEVER VICTIMS. I opened it and found it contained the case histories of those men who had been attacked by the strange malady. Reading them over, I was struck by one detail. Each patient had received the first symptoms, not while working in the mines, but while sleeping or lounging in the barracks. Five minutes later Karn and I were striding down a white ramp that led to the nearest barracks. The building came into sight, a low rectangular structure, dome-roofed to withstand the violent winds. Inside double tiers of bunks stretched along either wall. In those bunks some thirty men lay sleeping. The far wall was taken up by a huge window of denvo-quartz. As I stood there, something suddenly caught Ezra Karn's eye. He began to walk toward that window. "Look here," he said. Six feet up on that window a small almost imperceptible button of dull metal had been wedged into an aperture cut in the quartz. The central part of the button appeared to be a powerful lens of some kind, and as I seized it and pulled it loose, I felt the hum of tiny clock work. All at once I had it! Red spot fever. Heat fever from the infra-red rays of Jupiter's great spot. Someone had constructed this lens to concentrate and amplify the power of those rays. The internal clockwork served a double purpose. It opened a shutter, and it rotated the lens slowly so that it played for a time on each of the sleeping men. I slid the metal button in my pocket and left the barracks at a run. Back in the visiscreen room, I snapped to the operator: "Turn it on!" The kite car swam into view in the screen above the instrument panel. I stared with open eyes. Jimmy Baker no longer was in the car, nor was Xartal, the Martian. Grannie Annie was there, but seated at the controls was Antlers Park, the manager of Interstellar Voice. Ezra Karn jabbed my elbow. "Grannie's coming back. I thought she'd be getting sick of this blamed moon." It didn't make sense. In all the years I'd known Annabella C. Flowers, never yet had I seen her desert a case until she had woven the clues and facts to a logical conclusion. "Ezra," I said, "we're going to drive out and meet them. There's something screwy here." Ten minutes later in another kite car we were driving at a fast clip through the powdery sands of the Baldric. And before long we saw another car approaching. It was Grannie. As the car drew up alongside I saw her sitting in her prim way next to Antlers Park. Park said: "We left the others at the mine. Miss Flowers is going back with me to my offices to help me improve the formula for that new antitoxin." He waved his hand, and the car moved off. I watched it as it sped across the desert, and a growing suspicion began to form in my mind. Then, like a knife thrust, the truth struck me. "Ezra!" I yelled, swinging the car. "That wasn't Grannie! That was one of those damned cockatoo images. We've got to catch him." The other car was some distance ahead now. Park looked back and saw us following. He did something to the kite wire, and his car leaped ahead. I threw the speed indicator hard over. Our kite was a huge box affair with a steady powerful pull to the connecting wire. Park's vehicle was drawn by a flat triangular kite that dove and fluttered with each variance of the wind. Steadily we began to close in. The manager of Interstellar Voice turned again, and something glinted in his hand. There was a flash of purple flame, and a round hole appeared in our windscreen inches above Karn's head. "Heat gun!" Ezra yelled. Now we were rocketing over the sand dunes, winding in and out between the flagpole trees. I had to catch that car I told myself. Grannie Annie's very life might be at stake, not to mention the lives of hundreds of mine workers. Again Park took aim and again a hole shattered our windscreen. The wind shifted and blew from another quarter. The box kite soared, but the triangular kite faltered. Taking advantage of Park's loss of speed, I raced alongside. The I. V. manager lifted his weapon frantically. But before he could use it a third time, Ezra Karn had whipped a lariat from his belt and sent it coiling across the intervening space. The thong yanked tight about the manager's throat. Park did the only thing he could do. He shut off power, and the two cars coasted to a halt. Then I was across in the other seat, wrenching the weapon free from his grasp. "What have you done with Miss Flowers?" I demanded. The manager's eyes glittered with fear as he saw my finger tense on the trigger. Weakly he lifted an arm and pointed to the northwest. "Val-ley. Thir-ty miles. Entrance hidden by wall of ... flagpole trees." I leaped into the driver's seat and gave the kite its head. And now the country began to undergo a subtle change. The trees seemed to group themselves in a long flanking corridor in a northwesterly direction, as if to hide some secret that lay beyond. Twice I attempted to penetrate that wall, only to find my way blocked by those curious growths. Then a corridor opened before me; a mile forward and the desert began again. But it was a new desert this time: the sand packed hard as granite, the way ahead utterly devoid of vegetation. In the distance black bulging hills extended to right and left, with a narrow chasm or doorway between. I headed for that entrance, and when I reached it, I shut off power with an exclamation of astonishment. There was a huge chair-shaped rock there, and seated upon it was Grannie Annie. She had a tablet in her hands, and she was writing. "Grannie!" I yelled. "What're you doing here? Where's Mr. Baker?" She rose to her feet and clambered down the rock. "Getting back Jimmy's mine laborers," she said, a twinkle in her eyes. "I see you've got Antlers Park. I'm glad of that. It saves me a lot of trouble." She took off her spectacles and wiped them on her sleeve. "Don't look so fuddled, Billy-boy. Come along, and I'll show you." She led the way through the narrow passage into the valley. A deep gorge, it was, with the black sheer cliffs on either side pressing close. Ten feet forward, I stopped short, staring in amazement. Advancing toward me like a column of infantry came a long line of Larynx miners. They walked slowly, looking straight ahead, moving down the center of the gorge toward the entrance. But there was more! A kite car was drawn up to the side. The windscreen had been removed, and mounted on the hood was a large bullet-like contrivance that looked not unlike a search lamp. A blinding shaft of bluish radiance spewed from its open end. Playing it back and forth upon the marching men were Jimmy Baker and Xartal, the Martian. "Ultra violet," Grannie Annie explained. "The opposite end of the vibratory scale and the only thing that will combat the infra-red rays that cause red spot fever. Those men won't stop walking until they've reached Shaft Four." Grannie Annie told her story during the long ride back to Shaft Four. We drove slowly, keeping the line of marching Larynx miners always ahead of us. Jimmy Baker had struck a new big lode of Acoustix, a lode which if worked successfully would see Larynx Incorporated become a far more powerful exporting concern than Interstellar Voice . Antlers Park didn't want that. It was he or his agents who placed those lens buttons in the Larynx barracks. For he knew that just as Jupiter's great spot was responsible for a climate and atmosphere suitable for an Earthman on this Eighth Moon, so also was that spot a deadly power in itself, capable when its rays were concentrated of causing a fatal sickness. Then suddenly becoming fearful of Grannie's prying, Antlers Park strove to head her off before she reached Shaft Four. He did head her off and managed to lure her and Baker and Xartal into the Shaft barracks where they would be exposed to the rays from the lens button. But Grannie only pretended to contract the plague. Park then attempted to outwit Ezra Karn and me by returning in Jimmy Baker's kite car with a cockatoo image of Grannie. I listened to all this in silence. "But," I said when she had finished, "how did Park manage to have that image created and why did the mine laborers walk out into the Baldric when they contracted the fever?" Grannie Annie frowned. "I'm not sure I can answer the first of those questions," she replied. "You must remember Antlers Park has been on this moon five years and during that time he must have acquainted himself with many of its secrets. Probably he learned long ago just what to do to make a cockatoo create a mental image. "As for the men going out into the Baldric, that was more of Park's diabolical work. In the walls of the barracks besides those lens buttons were also miniature electro-hypnotic plates, with the master controlling unit located in that valley. Park knew that when the miners were in a drugged condition from the effects of the fever they would be susceptible to the machine's lure.... And now, Billy-boy, are you coming with me?" "Coming with you?" I repeated. "Where?" The old lady lit a cigarette. "Pluto maybe," she said. "There's a penal colony there, you know, and that ought to tie in nicely with a new crime story. I can see it now ... prison break, stolen rocket ship, fugitives lurking in the interplanetary lanes...." "Grannie," I laughed. "You're incorrigible!"

What settings does the story take place in?

3

The surface of Jupiter's Eighth Moon is covered in desert with huge trees that look like giant cat-tails, long thin poles with a melon-shaped part on top. It is very windy, which pushes all of the desert sand around a lot. The "flagpole trees" mark the edge of the Baldric, an area defined by the trees and a cockatoo-like creature. When Antlers Park said that the area would be trouble, Grannie knew she had to investigate. The Baldric itself acts as a line between the areas controlled by the two mining companies, and the mines themselves are where the work happens. Most of the surface, then, is covered either in sand or rock. The other major location in the story is the headquarters of Larynx Incorporated, which is also on Jupiter's Eighth Moon. In the headquarters, there are barracks for the miners, which have huge windows made of denvo-quartz. There is a commissary where people can eat, and a number of administrative areas such as Jimmy's office, and a large visiscreen room where the characters at the headquarters are able to track the movements of the part of the group that left to investigate Red Spot Fever.

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Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net DOUBLE TROUBLE by CARL JACOBI Grannie Annie, that waspish science-fiction writer, was in a jam again. What with red-spot fever, talking cockatoos and flagpole trees, I was running in circles—especially since Grannie became twins every now and then. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] We had left the offices of Interstellar Voice three days ago, Earth time, and now as the immense disc of Jupiter flamed across the sky, entered the outer limits of the Baldric. Grannie Annie strode in the lead, her absurd long-skirted black dress looking as out of place in this desert as the trees. Flagpole trees. They rose straight up like enormous cat-tails, with only a melon-shaped protuberance at the top to show they were a form of vegetation. Everything else was blanketed by the sand and the powerful wind that blew from all quarters. As we reached the first of those trees, Grannie came to a halt. "This is the Baldric all right. If my calculations are right, we've hit it at its narrowest spot." Ezra Karn took a greasy pipe from his lips and spat. "It looks like the rest of this God-forsaken moon," he said, "'ceptin for them sticks." Xartal, the Martian illustrator, said nothing. He was like that, taciturn, speaking only when spoken to. He could be excused this time, however, for this was only our third day on Jupiter's Eighth Moon, and the country was still strange to us. When Annabella C. Flowers, that renowned writer of science fiction, visiphoned me at Crater City, Mars, to meet her here, I had thought she was crazy. But Miss Flowers, known to her friends as Grannie Annie, had always been mildly crazy. If you haven't read her books, you've missed something. She's the author of Lady of the Green Flames , Lady of the Runaway Planet , Lady of the Crimson Space-Beast , and other works of science fiction. Blood-and-thunder as these books are, however, they have one redeeming feature—authenticity of background. Grannie Annie was the original research digger-upper, and when she laid the setting of a yarn on a star of the sixth magnitude, only a transportation-velocity of less than light could prevent her from visiting her "stage" in person. Therefore when she asked me to meet her at the landing field of Interstellar Voice on Jupiter's Eighth Moon, I knew she had another novel in the state of embryo. What I didn't expect was Ezra Karn. He was an old prospector Grannie had met, and he had become so attached to the authoress he now followed her wherever she went. As for Xartal, he was a Martian and was slated to do the illustrations for Grannie's new book. Five minutes after my ship had blasted down, the four of us met in the offices of Interstellar Voice . And then I was shaking hands with Antlers Park, the manager of I. V. himself. "Glad to meet you," he said cordially. "I've just been trying to persuade Miss Flowers not to attempt a trip into the Baldric." "What's the Baldric?" I had asked. Antlers Park flicked the ash from his cheroot and shrugged. "Will you believe me, sir," he said, "when I tell you I've been out here on this forsaken moon five years and don't rightly know myself?" I scowled at that; it didn't make sense. "However, as you perhaps know, the only reason for colonial activities here at all is because of the presence of an ore known as Acoustix. It's no use to the people of Earth but of untold value on Mars. I'm not up on the scientific reasons, but it seems that life on the red planet has developed with a supersonic method of vocal communication. The Martian speaks as the Earthman does, but he amplifies his thoughts' transmission by way of wave lengths as high as three million vibrations per second. The trouble is that by the time the average Martian reaches middle age, his ability to produce those vibrations steadily decreases. Then it was found that this ore, Acoustix, revitalized their sounding apparatus, and the rush was on." "What do you mean?" Park leaned back. "The rush to find more of the ore," he explained. "But up until now this moon is the only place where it can be found. "There are two companies here," he continued, " Interstellar Voice and Larynx Incorporated . Chap by the name of Jimmy Baker runs that. However, the point is, between the properties of these two companies stretches a band or belt which has become known as the Baldric. "There are two principal forms of life in the Baldric; flagpole trees and a species of ornithoid resembling cockatoos. So far no one has crossed the Baldric without trouble." "What sort of trouble?" Grannie Annie had demanded. And when Antlers Park stuttered evasively, the old lady snorted, "Fiddlesticks, I never saw trouble yet that couldn't be explained. We leave in an hour." So now here we were at the outer reaches of the Baldric, four travelers on foot with only the barest necessities in the way of equipment and supplies. I walked forward to get a closer view of one of the flagpole trees. And then abruptly I saw something else. A queer-looking bird squatted there in the sand, looking up at me. Silver in plumage, it resembled a parrot with a crest; and yet it didn't. In some strange way the thing was a hideous caricature. "Look what I found," I yelled. "What I found," said the cockatoo in a very human voice. "Thunder, it talks," I said amazed. "Talks," repeated the bird, blinking its eyes. The cockatoo repeated my last statement again, then rose on its short legs, flapped its wings once and soared off into the sky. Xartal, the Martian illustrator, already had a notebook in his hands and was sketching a likeness of the creature. Ten minutes later we were on the move again. We saw more silver cockatoos and more flagpole trees. Above us, the great disc of Jupiter began to descend toward the horizon. And then all at once Grannie stopped again, this time at the top of a high ridge. She shielded her eyes and stared off into the plain we had just crossed. "Billy-boy," she said to me in a strange voice, "look down there and tell me what you see." I followed the direction of her hand and a shock went through me from head to foot. Down there, slowly toiling across the sand, advanced a party of four persons. In the lead was a little old lady in a black dress. Behind her strode a grizzled Earth man in a flop-brimmed hat, another Earth man, and a Martian. Detail for detail they were a duplicate of ourselves! "A mirage!" said Ezra Karn. But it wasn't a mirage. As the party came closer, we could see that their lips were moving, and their voices became audible. I listened in awe. The duplicate of myself was talking to the duplicate of Grannie Annie, and she was replying in the most natural way. Steadily the four travelers approached. Then, when a dozen yards away, they suddenly faded like a negative exposed to light and disappeared. "What do you make of it?" I said in a hushed voice. Grannie shook her head. "Might be a form of mass hypnosis superinduced by some chemical radiations," she replied. "Whatever it is, we'd better watch our step. There's no telling what might lie ahead." We walked after that with taut nerves and watchful eyes, but we saw no repetition of the "mirage." The wind continued to blow ceaselessly, and the sand seemed to grow more and more powdery. For some time I had fixed my gaze on a dot in the sky which I supposed to be a high-flying cockatoo. As that dot continued to move across the heavens in a single direction, I called Grannie's attention to it. "It's a kite," she nodded. "There should be a car attached to it somewhere." She offered no further explanation, but a quarter of an hour later as we topped another rise a curious elliptical car with a long slanting windscreen came into view. Attached to its hood was a taut wire which slanted up into the sky to connect with the kite. A man was driving and when he saw us, he waved. Five minutes later Grannie was shaking his hand vigorously and mumbling introductions. "This is Jimmy Baker," she said. "He manages Larynx Incorporated , and he's the real reason we're here." I decided I liked Baker the moment I saw him. In his middle thirties, he was tall and lean, with pleasant blue eyes which even his sand goggles could not conceal. "I can't tell you how glad I am you're here, Grannie," he said. "If anybody can help me, you can." Grannie's eyes glittered. "Trouble with the mine laborers?" she questioned. Jimmy Baker nodded. He told his story over the roar of the wind as we headed back across the desert. Occasionally he touched a stud on an electric windlass to which the kite wire was attached. Apparently these adjustments moved planes or fins on the kite and accounted for the car's ability to move in any direction. "If I weren't a realist, I'd say that Larynx Incorporated has been bewitched," he began slowly. "We pay our men high wages and give them excellent living conditions with a vacation on Callisto every year. Up until a short time ago most of them were in excellent health and spirits. Then the Red Spot Fever got them." "Red Spot Fever?" Grannie looked at him curiously. Jimmy Baker nodded. "The first symptoms are a tendency to garrulousness on the part of the patient. Then they disappear." He paused to make an adjustment of the windlass. "They walk out into the Baldric," he continued, "and nothing can stop them. We tried following them, of course, but it was no go. As soon as they realize they're being followed, they stop. But the moment our eyes are turned, they give us the slip." "But surely you must have some idea of where they go," Grannie said. Baker lit a cigarette. "There's all kinds of rumors," he replied, "but none of them will hold water. By the way, there's a cockatoo eyrie ahead of us." I followed his gaze and saw a curious structure suspended between a rude circle of flagpole trees. A strange web-like formation of translucent gauzy material, it was. Fully two hundred cockatoos were perched upon it. They watched us with their mild eyes as we passed, but they didn't move. After that we were rolling up the driveway that led to the offices of Larynx Incorporated . As Jimmy Baker led the way up the inclined ramp, a door in the central building opened, and a man emerged. His face was drawn. "Mr. Baker," he said breathlessly, "seventy-five workers at Shaft Four have headed out into the Baldric." Baker dropped his cigarette and ground his heel on it savagely. "Shaft Four, eh?" he repeated. "That's our principal mine. If the fever spreads there, I'm licked." He motioned us into his office and strode across to a desk. Silent Xartal, the Martian illustrator, took a chair in a corner and got his notebook out, sketching the room's interior. Grannie Annie remained standing. Presently the old lady walked across to the desk and helped herself to the bottle of Martian whiskey there. "There must be ways of stopping this," she said. "Have you called in any physicians? Why don't you call an enforced vacation and send the men away until the plague has died down?" Baker shook his head. "Three doctors from Callisto were here last month. They were as much at loss as I am. As for sending the men away, I may have to do that, but when I do, it means quits. Our company is chartered with Spacolonial, and you know what that means. Failure to produce during a period of thirty days or more, and you lose all rights." A visiphone bell sounded, and Baker walked across to the instrument. A man's face formed in the vision plate. Baker listened, said "Okay" and threw off the switch. "The entire crew of Shaft Four have gone out into the Baldric," he said slowly. There was a large map hanging on the wall back of Baker's desk. Grannie Annie walked across to it and began to study its markings. "Shaft Four is at the outer edge of the Baldric at a point where that corridor is at its widest," she said. Baker looked up. "That's right. We only began operations there a comparatively short time ago. Struck a rich vein of Acoustix that runs deep in. If that vein holds out, we'll double the output of Interstellar Voice , our rival, in a year." Grannie nodded. "I think you and I and Xartal had better take a run up there," she said. "But first I want to see your laboratory." There was no refusing her. Jimmy Baker led the way down to a lower level where a huge laboratory and experimental shop ran the length of the building. Grannie seized a light weight carry-case and began dropping articles into it. A pontocated glass lens, three or four Wellington radite bulbs, each with a spectroscopic filament, a small dynamo that would operate on a kite windlass, and a quantity of wire and other items. The kite car was brought out again, and the old woman, Baker and the Martian took their places in it. Then Jimmy waved, and the car began to roll down the ramp. Not until they had vanished in the desert haze did I sense the loneliness of this outpost. With that loneliness came a sudden sense of foreboding. Had I been a fool to let Grannie go? I thought of her, an old woman who should be in a rocking chair, knitting socks. If anything happened to Annabella C. Flowers, I would never forgive myself and neither would her millions of readers. Ezra Karn and I went back into the office. The old prospector chuckled. "Dang human dynamo. Got more energy than a runaway comet." A connecting door on the far side of the office opened onto a long corridor which ended at a staircase. "Let's look around," I said. We passed down the corridor and climbed the staircase to the second floor. Here were the general offices of Larynx Incorporated , and through glass doors I could see clerks busy with counting machines and report tapes. In another chamber the extremely light Acoustix ore was being packed into big cases and marked for shipment. At the far end a door to a small room stood open. Inside a young man was tilted back in a swivel chair before a complicated instrument panel. "C'mon in," he said, seeing us. "If you want a look at your friends, here they are." He flicked a stud, and the entire wall above the panel underwent a slow change of colors. Those colors whirled kaleidescopically, then coalesced into a three-dimensional scene. It was a scene of a rapidly unfolding desert country as seen from the rear of a kite car. Directly behind the windscreen, backs turned to me, were Jimmy Baker, Grannie, and Xartal. It was as if I were standing directly behind them. "It's Mr. Baker's own invention," the operator said. "An improvement on the visiphone." "Do you mean to say you can follow the movements of that car and its passengers wherever it goes? Can you hear them talk too?" "Sure." The operator turned another dial, and Grannie's falsetto voice entered the room. It stopped abruptly. "The machine uses a lot of power," the operator said, "and as yet we haven't got much." The cloud of anxiety which had wrapped itself about me disappeared somewhat as I viewed this device. At least I could now keep myself posted of Grannie's movements. Karn and I went down to the commissary where we ate our supper. When we returned to Jimmy Baker's office, the visiphone bell was ringing. I went over to it and turned it on, and to my surprise the face of Antlers Park flashed on the screen. "Hello," he said in his friendly way. "I see you arrived all right. Is Miss Flowers there?" "Miss Flowers left with Mr. Baker for Shaft Four," I said. "There's trouble up there. Red spot fever." "Fever, eh?" repeated Park. "That's a shame. Is there anything I can do?" "Tell me," I said, "has your company had any trouble with this plague?" "A little. But up until yesterday the fever's been confined to the other side of the Baldric. We had one partial case, but my chemists gave the chap an antitoxin that seems to have worked. Come to think of it, I might drive over to Shaft Four and give Jimmy Baker the formula. I haven't been out in the Baldric for years, but if you didn't have any trouble, I shouldn't either." We exchanged a few more pleasantries, and then he rang off. In exactly an hour I went upstairs to the visiscreen room. Then once more I was directly behind my friends, listening in on their conversation. The view through the windscreen showed an irregular array of flagpole trees, with the sky dotted by high-flying cockatoos. "There's an eyrie over there," Jimmy Baker was saying. "We might as well camp beside it." Moments later a rude circle of flagpole trees loomed ahead. Across the top of them was stretched a translucent web. Jimmy and Grannie got out of the car and began making camp. Xartal remained in his seat. He was drawing pictures on large pieces of pasteboard, and as I stood there in the visiscreen room, I watched him. There was no doubt about it, the Martian was clever. He would make a few rapid lines on one of the pasteboards, rub it a little to get the proper shading and then go on to the next. In swift rotation likenesses of Ezra Karn, of myself, of Jimmy Baker, and of Antlers Park took form. Ezra spoke over my shoulder. "He's doing scenes for Grannie's new book," he said. "The old lady figures on using the events here for a plot. Look at that damned nosy bird! " A silver cockatoo had alighted on the kite car and was surveying curiously Xartal's work. As each drawing was completed, the bird scanned it with rapt attention. Abruptly it flew to the top of the eyrie, where it seemed to be having a consultation with its bird companions. And then abruptly it happened. The cockatoos took off in mass flight. A group of Earth people suddenly materialized on the eyrie, talking and moving about as if it were the most natural thing in the world. With a shock I saw the likeness of myself; I saw Ezra Karn; and I saw the image of Jimmy Baker. The real Jimmy Baker stood next to Grannie, staring up at this incredible mirage. Grannie let out a whoop. "I've got it!" she said. "Those things we see up there are nothing more than mental images. They're Xartal's drawings!" "Don't you see," the lady continued. "Everything that Xartal put on paper has been seen by one or more of these cockatoos. The cockatoos are like Earth parrots all right, but not only have they the power of copying speech, they also have the ability to recreate a mental image of what they have seen. In other words their brains form a powerful photographic impression of the object. That impression is then transmitted simultaneously in telepathic wavelengths to common foci. That eyrie might be likened to a cinema screen, receiving brain vibrations from a hundred different sources that blend into the light field to form what are apparently three-dimensional images." The Larynx manager nodded slowly. "I see," he said. "But why don't the birds reconstruct images from the actual person. Why use drawings?" "Probably because the drawings are exaggerated in certain details and made a greater impression on their brains," Grannie replied. Up on the eyrie a strange performance was taking place. The duplicate of Grannie Annie was bowing to the duplicate of Jimmy Baker, and the image of Ezra Karn was playing leap frog with the image of Antlers Park. Then abruptly the screen before me blurred and went blank. "Sorry," the operator said. "I've used too much power already. Have to give the generators a chance to build it up again." Nodding, I turned and motioned to Karn. We went back downstairs. "That explains something at any rate," the old prospector said. "But how about that Red spot fever?" On Jimmy Baker's desk was a large file marked: FEVER VICTIMS. I opened it and found it contained the case histories of those men who had been attacked by the strange malady. Reading them over, I was struck by one detail. Each patient had received the first symptoms, not while working in the mines, but while sleeping or lounging in the barracks. Five minutes later Karn and I were striding down a white ramp that led to the nearest barracks. The building came into sight, a low rectangular structure, dome-roofed to withstand the violent winds. Inside double tiers of bunks stretched along either wall. In those bunks some thirty men lay sleeping. The far wall was taken up by a huge window of denvo-quartz. As I stood there, something suddenly caught Ezra Karn's eye. He began to walk toward that window. "Look here," he said. Six feet up on that window a small almost imperceptible button of dull metal had been wedged into an aperture cut in the quartz. The central part of the button appeared to be a powerful lens of some kind, and as I seized it and pulled it loose, I felt the hum of tiny clock work. All at once I had it! Red spot fever. Heat fever from the infra-red rays of Jupiter's great spot. Someone had constructed this lens to concentrate and amplify the power of those rays. The internal clockwork served a double purpose. It opened a shutter, and it rotated the lens slowly so that it played for a time on each of the sleeping men. I slid the metal button in my pocket and left the barracks at a run. Back in the visiscreen room, I snapped to the operator: "Turn it on!" The kite car swam into view in the screen above the instrument panel. I stared with open eyes. Jimmy Baker no longer was in the car, nor was Xartal, the Martian. Grannie Annie was there, but seated at the controls was Antlers Park, the manager of Interstellar Voice. Ezra Karn jabbed my elbow. "Grannie's coming back. I thought she'd be getting sick of this blamed moon." It didn't make sense. In all the years I'd known Annabella C. Flowers, never yet had I seen her desert a case until she had woven the clues and facts to a logical conclusion. "Ezra," I said, "we're going to drive out and meet them. There's something screwy here." Ten minutes later in another kite car we were driving at a fast clip through the powdery sands of the Baldric. And before long we saw another car approaching. It was Grannie. As the car drew up alongside I saw her sitting in her prim way next to Antlers Park. Park said: "We left the others at the mine. Miss Flowers is going back with me to my offices to help me improve the formula for that new antitoxin." He waved his hand, and the car moved off. I watched it as it sped across the desert, and a growing suspicion began to form in my mind. Then, like a knife thrust, the truth struck me. "Ezra!" I yelled, swinging the car. "That wasn't Grannie! That was one of those damned cockatoo images. We've got to catch him." The other car was some distance ahead now. Park looked back and saw us following. He did something to the kite wire, and his car leaped ahead. I threw the speed indicator hard over. Our kite was a huge box affair with a steady powerful pull to the connecting wire. Park's vehicle was drawn by a flat triangular kite that dove and fluttered with each variance of the wind. Steadily we began to close in. The manager of Interstellar Voice turned again, and something glinted in his hand. There was a flash of purple flame, and a round hole appeared in our windscreen inches above Karn's head. "Heat gun!" Ezra yelled. Now we were rocketing over the sand dunes, winding in and out between the flagpole trees. I had to catch that car I told myself. Grannie Annie's very life might be at stake, not to mention the lives of hundreds of mine workers. Again Park took aim and again a hole shattered our windscreen. The wind shifted and blew from another quarter. The box kite soared, but the triangular kite faltered. Taking advantage of Park's loss of speed, I raced alongside. The I. V. manager lifted his weapon frantically. But before he could use it a third time, Ezra Karn had whipped a lariat from his belt and sent it coiling across the intervening space. The thong yanked tight about the manager's throat. Park did the only thing he could do. He shut off power, and the two cars coasted to a halt. Then I was across in the other seat, wrenching the weapon free from his grasp. "What have you done with Miss Flowers?" I demanded. The manager's eyes glittered with fear as he saw my finger tense on the trigger. Weakly he lifted an arm and pointed to the northwest. "Val-ley. Thir-ty miles. Entrance hidden by wall of ... flagpole trees." I leaped into the driver's seat and gave the kite its head. And now the country began to undergo a subtle change. The trees seemed to group themselves in a long flanking corridor in a northwesterly direction, as if to hide some secret that lay beyond. Twice I attempted to penetrate that wall, only to find my way blocked by those curious growths. Then a corridor opened before me; a mile forward and the desert began again. But it was a new desert this time: the sand packed hard as granite, the way ahead utterly devoid of vegetation. In the distance black bulging hills extended to right and left, with a narrow chasm or doorway between. I headed for that entrance, and when I reached it, I shut off power with an exclamation of astonishment. There was a huge chair-shaped rock there, and seated upon it was Grannie Annie. She had a tablet in her hands, and she was writing. "Grannie!" I yelled. "What're you doing here? Where's Mr. Baker?" She rose to her feet and clambered down the rock. "Getting back Jimmy's mine laborers," she said, a twinkle in her eyes. "I see you've got Antlers Park. I'm glad of that. It saves me a lot of trouble." She took off her spectacles and wiped them on her sleeve. "Don't look so fuddled, Billy-boy. Come along, and I'll show you." She led the way through the narrow passage into the valley. A deep gorge, it was, with the black sheer cliffs on either side pressing close. Ten feet forward, I stopped short, staring in amazement. Advancing toward me like a column of infantry came a long line of Larynx miners. They walked slowly, looking straight ahead, moving down the center of the gorge toward the entrance. But there was more! A kite car was drawn up to the side. The windscreen had been removed, and mounted on the hood was a large bullet-like contrivance that looked not unlike a search lamp. A blinding shaft of bluish radiance spewed from its open end. Playing it back and forth upon the marching men were Jimmy Baker and Xartal, the Martian. "Ultra violet," Grannie Annie explained. "The opposite end of the vibratory scale and the only thing that will combat the infra-red rays that cause red spot fever. Those men won't stop walking until they've reached Shaft Four." Grannie Annie told her story during the long ride back to Shaft Four. We drove slowly, keeping the line of marching Larynx miners always ahead of us. Jimmy Baker had struck a new big lode of Acoustix, a lode which if worked successfully would see Larynx Incorporated become a far more powerful exporting concern than Interstellar Voice . Antlers Park didn't want that. It was he or his agents who placed those lens buttons in the Larynx barracks. For he knew that just as Jupiter's great spot was responsible for a climate and atmosphere suitable for an Earthman on this Eighth Moon, so also was that spot a deadly power in itself, capable when its rays were concentrated of causing a fatal sickness. Then suddenly becoming fearful of Grannie's prying, Antlers Park strove to head her off before she reached Shaft Four. He did head her off and managed to lure her and Baker and Xartal into the Shaft barracks where they would be exposed to the rays from the lens button. But Grannie only pretended to contract the plague. Park then attempted to outwit Ezra Karn and me by returning in Jimmy Baker's kite car with a cockatoo image of Grannie. I listened to all this in silence. "But," I said when she had finished, "how did Park manage to have that image created and why did the mine laborers walk out into the Baldric when they contracted the fever?" Grannie Annie frowned. "I'm not sure I can answer the first of those questions," she replied. "You must remember Antlers Park has been on this moon five years and during that time he must have acquainted himself with many of its secrets. Probably he learned long ago just what to do to make a cockatoo create a mental image. "As for the men going out into the Baldric, that was more of Park's diabolical work. In the walls of the barracks besides those lens buttons were also miniature electro-hypnotic plates, with the master controlling unit located in that valley. Park knew that when the miners were in a drugged condition from the effects of the fever they would be susceptible to the machine's lure.... And now, Billy-boy, are you coming with me?" "Coming with you?" I repeated. "Where?" The old lady lit a cigarette. "Pluto maybe," she said. "There's a penal colony there, you know, and that ought to tie in nicely with a new crime story. I can see it now ... prison break, stolen rocket ship, fugitives lurking in the interplanetary lanes...." "Grannie," I laughed. "You're incorrigible!"

What settings does the story take place in?

8

The primary action of the story takes place on Jupiter's Eighth Moon, where Grannie Annie assembles a team to help Jimmy Baker resolve the labor issues at his company, Larynx Incorporated. Although the team assembles at the headquarters of Jimmy's rival company, Interstellar Voice, they never go inside, and immediately make their way across a vast, desert-like area known as the Baldric. The manager of Interstellar Voice, Antlers Park, warns them of threats in the Baldric, but they never run into any such danger. Instead, they observe two of the Baldric's most unique characteristics: The flagpole trees that look like vertical cat tails topped with a melon-like protuberance and the bird-like creatures resembling cockatoos that build large, transparent, web-like nests between them. The cockatoos are silver and look like parrots with a crest and have the unique ability to mimic not only the sounds of a person's voice but also the 3D image of their visage in exact duplicate. As the team makes their way across the desert, they are pelted by wind and powdery sand and climb a high ridge from which they are picked up by Jimmy Baker flying his kite-guided car. These vehicles appear to be the main mode of transportation for representatives of both companies on the moon. The final unique setting of the story is Larynx Incorporated, which is comprised of offices and crew bunkers in a large central building, several mining shafts spread throughout the Baldric, a laboratory, a commissary, and an experimental shop. From one of the many offices in the building, an operator shows Billy and Ezra an update to the visiphone that allows viewers to witness 3D events remotely. Later, Billy and Ezra examine the barracks, housed in a low, rectangular building with a dome roof.

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Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net DOUBLE TROUBLE by CARL JACOBI Grannie Annie, that waspish science-fiction writer, was in a jam again. What with red-spot fever, talking cockatoos and flagpole trees, I was running in circles—especially since Grannie became twins every now and then. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] We had left the offices of Interstellar Voice three days ago, Earth time, and now as the immense disc of Jupiter flamed across the sky, entered the outer limits of the Baldric. Grannie Annie strode in the lead, her absurd long-skirted black dress looking as out of place in this desert as the trees. Flagpole trees. They rose straight up like enormous cat-tails, with only a melon-shaped protuberance at the top to show they were a form of vegetation. Everything else was blanketed by the sand and the powerful wind that blew from all quarters. As we reached the first of those trees, Grannie came to a halt. "This is the Baldric all right. If my calculations are right, we've hit it at its narrowest spot." Ezra Karn took a greasy pipe from his lips and spat. "It looks like the rest of this God-forsaken moon," he said, "'ceptin for them sticks." Xartal, the Martian illustrator, said nothing. He was like that, taciturn, speaking only when spoken to. He could be excused this time, however, for this was only our third day on Jupiter's Eighth Moon, and the country was still strange to us. When Annabella C. Flowers, that renowned writer of science fiction, visiphoned me at Crater City, Mars, to meet her here, I had thought she was crazy. But Miss Flowers, known to her friends as Grannie Annie, had always been mildly crazy. If you haven't read her books, you've missed something. She's the author of Lady of the Green Flames , Lady of the Runaway Planet , Lady of the Crimson Space-Beast , and other works of science fiction. Blood-and-thunder as these books are, however, they have one redeeming feature—authenticity of background. Grannie Annie was the original research digger-upper, and when she laid the setting of a yarn on a star of the sixth magnitude, only a transportation-velocity of less than light could prevent her from visiting her "stage" in person. Therefore when she asked me to meet her at the landing field of Interstellar Voice on Jupiter's Eighth Moon, I knew she had another novel in the state of embryo. What I didn't expect was Ezra Karn. He was an old prospector Grannie had met, and he had become so attached to the authoress he now followed her wherever she went. As for Xartal, he was a Martian and was slated to do the illustrations for Grannie's new book. Five minutes after my ship had blasted down, the four of us met in the offices of Interstellar Voice . And then I was shaking hands with Antlers Park, the manager of I. V. himself. "Glad to meet you," he said cordially. "I've just been trying to persuade Miss Flowers not to attempt a trip into the Baldric." "What's the Baldric?" I had asked. Antlers Park flicked the ash from his cheroot and shrugged. "Will you believe me, sir," he said, "when I tell you I've been out here on this forsaken moon five years and don't rightly know myself?" I scowled at that; it didn't make sense. "However, as you perhaps know, the only reason for colonial activities here at all is because of the presence of an ore known as Acoustix. It's no use to the people of Earth but of untold value on Mars. I'm not up on the scientific reasons, but it seems that life on the red planet has developed with a supersonic method of vocal communication. The Martian speaks as the Earthman does, but he amplifies his thoughts' transmission by way of wave lengths as high as three million vibrations per second. The trouble is that by the time the average Martian reaches middle age, his ability to produce those vibrations steadily decreases. Then it was found that this ore, Acoustix, revitalized their sounding apparatus, and the rush was on." "What do you mean?" Park leaned back. "The rush to find more of the ore," he explained. "But up until now this moon is the only place where it can be found. "There are two companies here," he continued, " Interstellar Voice and Larynx Incorporated . Chap by the name of Jimmy Baker runs that. However, the point is, between the properties of these two companies stretches a band or belt which has become known as the Baldric. "There are two principal forms of life in the Baldric; flagpole trees and a species of ornithoid resembling cockatoos. So far no one has crossed the Baldric without trouble." "What sort of trouble?" Grannie Annie had demanded. And when Antlers Park stuttered evasively, the old lady snorted, "Fiddlesticks, I never saw trouble yet that couldn't be explained. We leave in an hour." So now here we were at the outer reaches of the Baldric, four travelers on foot with only the barest necessities in the way of equipment and supplies. I walked forward to get a closer view of one of the flagpole trees. And then abruptly I saw something else. A queer-looking bird squatted there in the sand, looking up at me. Silver in plumage, it resembled a parrot with a crest; and yet it didn't. In some strange way the thing was a hideous caricature. "Look what I found," I yelled. "What I found," said the cockatoo in a very human voice. "Thunder, it talks," I said amazed. "Talks," repeated the bird, blinking its eyes. The cockatoo repeated my last statement again, then rose on its short legs, flapped its wings once and soared off into the sky. Xartal, the Martian illustrator, already had a notebook in his hands and was sketching a likeness of the creature. Ten minutes later we were on the move again. We saw more silver cockatoos and more flagpole trees. Above us, the great disc of Jupiter began to descend toward the horizon. And then all at once Grannie stopped again, this time at the top of a high ridge. She shielded her eyes and stared off into the plain we had just crossed. "Billy-boy," she said to me in a strange voice, "look down there and tell me what you see." I followed the direction of her hand and a shock went through me from head to foot. Down there, slowly toiling across the sand, advanced a party of four persons. In the lead was a little old lady in a black dress. Behind her strode a grizzled Earth man in a flop-brimmed hat, another Earth man, and a Martian. Detail for detail they were a duplicate of ourselves! "A mirage!" said Ezra Karn. But it wasn't a mirage. As the party came closer, we could see that their lips were moving, and their voices became audible. I listened in awe. The duplicate of myself was talking to the duplicate of Grannie Annie, and she was replying in the most natural way. Steadily the four travelers approached. Then, when a dozen yards away, they suddenly faded like a negative exposed to light and disappeared. "What do you make of it?" I said in a hushed voice. Grannie shook her head. "Might be a form of mass hypnosis superinduced by some chemical radiations," she replied. "Whatever it is, we'd better watch our step. There's no telling what might lie ahead." We walked after that with taut nerves and watchful eyes, but we saw no repetition of the "mirage." The wind continued to blow ceaselessly, and the sand seemed to grow more and more powdery. For some time I had fixed my gaze on a dot in the sky which I supposed to be a high-flying cockatoo. As that dot continued to move across the heavens in a single direction, I called Grannie's attention to it. "It's a kite," she nodded. "There should be a car attached to it somewhere." She offered no further explanation, but a quarter of an hour later as we topped another rise a curious elliptical car with a long slanting windscreen came into view. Attached to its hood was a taut wire which slanted up into the sky to connect with the kite. A man was driving and when he saw us, he waved. Five minutes later Grannie was shaking his hand vigorously and mumbling introductions. "This is Jimmy Baker," she said. "He manages Larynx Incorporated , and he's the real reason we're here." I decided I liked Baker the moment I saw him. In his middle thirties, he was tall and lean, with pleasant blue eyes which even his sand goggles could not conceal. "I can't tell you how glad I am you're here, Grannie," he said. "If anybody can help me, you can." Grannie's eyes glittered. "Trouble with the mine laborers?" she questioned. Jimmy Baker nodded. He told his story over the roar of the wind as we headed back across the desert. Occasionally he touched a stud on an electric windlass to which the kite wire was attached. Apparently these adjustments moved planes or fins on the kite and accounted for the car's ability to move in any direction. "If I weren't a realist, I'd say that Larynx Incorporated has been bewitched," he began slowly. "We pay our men high wages and give them excellent living conditions with a vacation on Callisto every year. Up until a short time ago most of them were in excellent health and spirits. Then the Red Spot Fever got them." "Red Spot Fever?" Grannie looked at him curiously. Jimmy Baker nodded. "The first symptoms are a tendency to garrulousness on the part of the patient. Then they disappear." He paused to make an adjustment of the windlass. "They walk out into the Baldric," he continued, "and nothing can stop them. We tried following them, of course, but it was no go. As soon as they realize they're being followed, they stop. But the moment our eyes are turned, they give us the slip." "But surely you must have some idea of where they go," Grannie said. Baker lit a cigarette. "There's all kinds of rumors," he replied, "but none of them will hold water. By the way, there's a cockatoo eyrie ahead of us." I followed his gaze and saw a curious structure suspended between a rude circle of flagpole trees. A strange web-like formation of translucent gauzy material, it was. Fully two hundred cockatoos were perched upon it. They watched us with their mild eyes as we passed, but they didn't move. After that we were rolling up the driveway that led to the offices of Larynx Incorporated . As Jimmy Baker led the way up the inclined ramp, a door in the central building opened, and a man emerged. His face was drawn. "Mr. Baker," he said breathlessly, "seventy-five workers at Shaft Four have headed out into the Baldric." Baker dropped his cigarette and ground his heel on it savagely. "Shaft Four, eh?" he repeated. "That's our principal mine. If the fever spreads there, I'm licked." He motioned us into his office and strode across to a desk. Silent Xartal, the Martian illustrator, took a chair in a corner and got his notebook out, sketching the room's interior. Grannie Annie remained standing. Presently the old lady walked across to the desk and helped herself to the bottle of Martian whiskey there. "There must be ways of stopping this," she said. "Have you called in any physicians? Why don't you call an enforced vacation and send the men away until the plague has died down?" Baker shook his head. "Three doctors from Callisto were here last month. They were as much at loss as I am. As for sending the men away, I may have to do that, but when I do, it means quits. Our company is chartered with Spacolonial, and you know what that means. Failure to produce during a period of thirty days or more, and you lose all rights." A visiphone bell sounded, and Baker walked across to the instrument. A man's face formed in the vision plate. Baker listened, said "Okay" and threw off the switch. "The entire crew of Shaft Four have gone out into the Baldric," he said slowly. There was a large map hanging on the wall back of Baker's desk. Grannie Annie walked across to it and began to study its markings. "Shaft Four is at the outer edge of the Baldric at a point where that corridor is at its widest," she said. Baker looked up. "That's right. We only began operations there a comparatively short time ago. Struck a rich vein of Acoustix that runs deep in. If that vein holds out, we'll double the output of Interstellar Voice , our rival, in a year." Grannie nodded. "I think you and I and Xartal had better take a run up there," she said. "But first I want to see your laboratory." There was no refusing her. Jimmy Baker led the way down to a lower level where a huge laboratory and experimental shop ran the length of the building. Grannie seized a light weight carry-case and began dropping articles into it. A pontocated glass lens, three or four Wellington radite bulbs, each with a spectroscopic filament, a small dynamo that would operate on a kite windlass, and a quantity of wire and other items. The kite car was brought out again, and the old woman, Baker and the Martian took their places in it. Then Jimmy waved, and the car began to roll down the ramp. Not until they had vanished in the desert haze did I sense the loneliness of this outpost. With that loneliness came a sudden sense of foreboding. Had I been a fool to let Grannie go? I thought of her, an old woman who should be in a rocking chair, knitting socks. If anything happened to Annabella C. Flowers, I would never forgive myself and neither would her millions of readers. Ezra Karn and I went back into the office. The old prospector chuckled. "Dang human dynamo. Got more energy than a runaway comet." A connecting door on the far side of the office opened onto a long corridor which ended at a staircase. "Let's look around," I said. We passed down the corridor and climbed the staircase to the second floor. Here were the general offices of Larynx Incorporated , and through glass doors I could see clerks busy with counting machines and report tapes. In another chamber the extremely light Acoustix ore was being packed into big cases and marked for shipment. At the far end a door to a small room stood open. Inside a young man was tilted back in a swivel chair before a complicated instrument panel. "C'mon in," he said, seeing us. "If you want a look at your friends, here they are." He flicked a stud, and the entire wall above the panel underwent a slow change of colors. Those colors whirled kaleidescopically, then coalesced into a three-dimensional scene. It was a scene of a rapidly unfolding desert country as seen from the rear of a kite car. Directly behind the windscreen, backs turned to me, were Jimmy Baker, Grannie, and Xartal. It was as if I were standing directly behind them. "It's Mr. Baker's own invention," the operator said. "An improvement on the visiphone." "Do you mean to say you can follow the movements of that car and its passengers wherever it goes? Can you hear them talk too?" "Sure." The operator turned another dial, and Grannie's falsetto voice entered the room. It stopped abruptly. "The machine uses a lot of power," the operator said, "and as yet we haven't got much." The cloud of anxiety which had wrapped itself about me disappeared somewhat as I viewed this device. At least I could now keep myself posted of Grannie's movements. Karn and I went down to the commissary where we ate our supper. When we returned to Jimmy Baker's office, the visiphone bell was ringing. I went over to it and turned it on, and to my surprise the face of Antlers Park flashed on the screen. "Hello," he said in his friendly way. "I see you arrived all right. Is Miss Flowers there?" "Miss Flowers left with Mr. Baker for Shaft Four," I said. "There's trouble up there. Red spot fever." "Fever, eh?" repeated Park. "That's a shame. Is there anything I can do?" "Tell me," I said, "has your company had any trouble with this plague?" "A little. But up until yesterday the fever's been confined to the other side of the Baldric. We had one partial case, but my chemists gave the chap an antitoxin that seems to have worked. Come to think of it, I might drive over to Shaft Four and give Jimmy Baker the formula. I haven't been out in the Baldric for years, but if you didn't have any trouble, I shouldn't either." We exchanged a few more pleasantries, and then he rang off. In exactly an hour I went upstairs to the visiscreen room. Then once more I was directly behind my friends, listening in on their conversation. The view through the windscreen showed an irregular array of flagpole trees, with the sky dotted by high-flying cockatoos. "There's an eyrie over there," Jimmy Baker was saying. "We might as well camp beside it." Moments later a rude circle of flagpole trees loomed ahead. Across the top of them was stretched a translucent web. Jimmy and Grannie got out of the car and began making camp. Xartal remained in his seat. He was drawing pictures on large pieces of pasteboard, and as I stood there in the visiscreen room, I watched him. There was no doubt about it, the Martian was clever. He would make a few rapid lines on one of the pasteboards, rub it a little to get the proper shading and then go on to the next. In swift rotation likenesses of Ezra Karn, of myself, of Jimmy Baker, and of Antlers Park took form. Ezra spoke over my shoulder. "He's doing scenes for Grannie's new book," he said. "The old lady figures on using the events here for a plot. Look at that damned nosy bird! " A silver cockatoo had alighted on the kite car and was surveying curiously Xartal's work. As each drawing was completed, the bird scanned it with rapt attention. Abruptly it flew to the top of the eyrie, where it seemed to be having a consultation with its bird companions. And then abruptly it happened. The cockatoos took off in mass flight. A group of Earth people suddenly materialized on the eyrie, talking and moving about as if it were the most natural thing in the world. With a shock I saw the likeness of myself; I saw Ezra Karn; and I saw the image of Jimmy Baker. The real Jimmy Baker stood next to Grannie, staring up at this incredible mirage. Grannie let out a whoop. "I've got it!" she said. "Those things we see up there are nothing more than mental images. They're Xartal's drawings!" "Don't you see," the lady continued. "Everything that Xartal put on paper has been seen by one or more of these cockatoos. The cockatoos are like Earth parrots all right, but not only have they the power of copying speech, they also have the ability to recreate a mental image of what they have seen. In other words their brains form a powerful photographic impression of the object. That impression is then transmitted simultaneously in telepathic wavelengths to common foci. That eyrie might be likened to a cinema screen, receiving brain vibrations from a hundred different sources that blend into the light field to form what are apparently three-dimensional images." The Larynx manager nodded slowly. "I see," he said. "But why don't the birds reconstruct images from the actual person. Why use drawings?" "Probably because the drawings are exaggerated in certain details and made a greater impression on their brains," Grannie replied. Up on the eyrie a strange performance was taking place. The duplicate of Grannie Annie was bowing to the duplicate of Jimmy Baker, and the image of Ezra Karn was playing leap frog with the image of Antlers Park. Then abruptly the screen before me blurred and went blank. "Sorry," the operator said. "I've used too much power already. Have to give the generators a chance to build it up again." Nodding, I turned and motioned to Karn. We went back downstairs. "That explains something at any rate," the old prospector said. "But how about that Red spot fever?" On Jimmy Baker's desk was a large file marked: FEVER VICTIMS. I opened it and found it contained the case histories of those men who had been attacked by the strange malady. Reading them over, I was struck by one detail. Each patient had received the first symptoms, not while working in the mines, but while sleeping or lounging in the barracks. Five minutes later Karn and I were striding down a white ramp that led to the nearest barracks. The building came into sight, a low rectangular structure, dome-roofed to withstand the violent winds. Inside double tiers of bunks stretched along either wall. In those bunks some thirty men lay sleeping. The far wall was taken up by a huge window of denvo-quartz. As I stood there, something suddenly caught Ezra Karn's eye. He began to walk toward that window. "Look here," he said. Six feet up on that window a small almost imperceptible button of dull metal had been wedged into an aperture cut in the quartz. The central part of the button appeared to be a powerful lens of some kind, and as I seized it and pulled it loose, I felt the hum of tiny clock work. All at once I had it! Red spot fever. Heat fever from the infra-red rays of Jupiter's great spot. Someone had constructed this lens to concentrate and amplify the power of those rays. The internal clockwork served a double purpose. It opened a shutter, and it rotated the lens slowly so that it played for a time on each of the sleeping men. I slid the metal button in my pocket and left the barracks at a run. Back in the visiscreen room, I snapped to the operator: "Turn it on!" The kite car swam into view in the screen above the instrument panel. I stared with open eyes. Jimmy Baker no longer was in the car, nor was Xartal, the Martian. Grannie Annie was there, but seated at the controls was Antlers Park, the manager of Interstellar Voice. Ezra Karn jabbed my elbow. "Grannie's coming back. I thought she'd be getting sick of this blamed moon." It didn't make sense. In all the years I'd known Annabella C. Flowers, never yet had I seen her desert a case until she had woven the clues and facts to a logical conclusion. "Ezra," I said, "we're going to drive out and meet them. There's something screwy here." Ten minutes later in another kite car we were driving at a fast clip through the powdery sands of the Baldric. And before long we saw another car approaching. It was Grannie. As the car drew up alongside I saw her sitting in her prim way next to Antlers Park. Park said: "We left the others at the mine. Miss Flowers is going back with me to my offices to help me improve the formula for that new antitoxin." He waved his hand, and the car moved off. I watched it as it sped across the desert, and a growing suspicion began to form in my mind. Then, like a knife thrust, the truth struck me. "Ezra!" I yelled, swinging the car. "That wasn't Grannie! That was one of those damned cockatoo images. We've got to catch him." The other car was some distance ahead now. Park looked back and saw us following. He did something to the kite wire, and his car leaped ahead. I threw the speed indicator hard over. Our kite was a huge box affair with a steady powerful pull to the connecting wire. Park's vehicle was drawn by a flat triangular kite that dove and fluttered with each variance of the wind. Steadily we began to close in. The manager of Interstellar Voice turned again, and something glinted in his hand. There was a flash of purple flame, and a round hole appeared in our windscreen inches above Karn's head. "Heat gun!" Ezra yelled. Now we were rocketing over the sand dunes, winding in and out between the flagpole trees. I had to catch that car I told myself. Grannie Annie's very life might be at stake, not to mention the lives of hundreds of mine workers. Again Park took aim and again a hole shattered our windscreen. The wind shifted and blew from another quarter. The box kite soared, but the triangular kite faltered. Taking advantage of Park's loss of speed, I raced alongside. The I. V. manager lifted his weapon frantically. But before he could use it a third time, Ezra Karn had whipped a lariat from his belt and sent it coiling across the intervening space. The thong yanked tight about the manager's throat. Park did the only thing he could do. He shut off power, and the two cars coasted to a halt. Then I was across in the other seat, wrenching the weapon free from his grasp. "What have you done with Miss Flowers?" I demanded. The manager's eyes glittered with fear as he saw my finger tense on the trigger. Weakly he lifted an arm and pointed to the northwest. "Val-ley. Thir-ty miles. Entrance hidden by wall of ... flagpole trees." I leaped into the driver's seat and gave the kite its head. And now the country began to undergo a subtle change. The trees seemed to group themselves in a long flanking corridor in a northwesterly direction, as if to hide some secret that lay beyond. Twice I attempted to penetrate that wall, only to find my way blocked by those curious growths. Then a corridor opened before me; a mile forward and the desert began again. But it was a new desert this time: the sand packed hard as granite, the way ahead utterly devoid of vegetation. In the distance black bulging hills extended to right and left, with a narrow chasm or doorway between. I headed for that entrance, and when I reached it, I shut off power with an exclamation of astonishment. There was a huge chair-shaped rock there, and seated upon it was Grannie Annie. She had a tablet in her hands, and she was writing. "Grannie!" I yelled. "What're you doing here? Where's Mr. Baker?" She rose to her feet and clambered down the rock. "Getting back Jimmy's mine laborers," she said, a twinkle in her eyes. "I see you've got Antlers Park. I'm glad of that. It saves me a lot of trouble." She took off her spectacles and wiped them on her sleeve. "Don't look so fuddled, Billy-boy. Come along, and I'll show you." She led the way through the narrow passage into the valley. A deep gorge, it was, with the black sheer cliffs on either side pressing close. Ten feet forward, I stopped short, staring in amazement. Advancing toward me like a column of infantry came a long line of Larynx miners. They walked slowly, looking straight ahead, moving down the center of the gorge toward the entrance. But there was more! A kite car was drawn up to the side. The windscreen had been removed, and mounted on the hood was a large bullet-like contrivance that looked not unlike a search lamp. A blinding shaft of bluish radiance spewed from its open end. Playing it back and forth upon the marching men were Jimmy Baker and Xartal, the Martian. "Ultra violet," Grannie Annie explained. "The opposite end of the vibratory scale and the only thing that will combat the infra-red rays that cause red spot fever. Those men won't stop walking until they've reached Shaft Four." Grannie Annie told her story during the long ride back to Shaft Four. We drove slowly, keeping the line of marching Larynx miners always ahead of us. Jimmy Baker had struck a new big lode of Acoustix, a lode which if worked successfully would see Larynx Incorporated become a far more powerful exporting concern than Interstellar Voice . Antlers Park didn't want that. It was he or his agents who placed those lens buttons in the Larynx barracks. For he knew that just as Jupiter's great spot was responsible for a climate and atmosphere suitable for an Earthman on this Eighth Moon, so also was that spot a deadly power in itself, capable when its rays were concentrated of causing a fatal sickness. Then suddenly becoming fearful of Grannie's prying, Antlers Park strove to head her off before she reached Shaft Four. He did head her off and managed to lure her and Baker and Xartal into the Shaft barracks where they would be exposed to the rays from the lens button. But Grannie only pretended to contract the plague. Park then attempted to outwit Ezra Karn and me by returning in Jimmy Baker's kite car with a cockatoo image of Grannie. I listened to all this in silence. "But," I said when she had finished, "how did Park manage to have that image created and why did the mine laborers walk out into the Baldric when they contracted the fever?" Grannie Annie frowned. "I'm not sure I can answer the first of those questions," she replied. "You must remember Antlers Park has been on this moon five years and during that time he must have acquainted himself with many of its secrets. Probably he learned long ago just what to do to make a cockatoo create a mental image. "As for the men going out into the Baldric, that was more of Park's diabolical work. In the walls of the barracks besides those lens buttons were also miniature electro-hypnotic plates, with the master controlling unit located in that valley. Park knew that when the miners were in a drugged condition from the effects of the fever they would be susceptible to the machine's lure.... And now, Billy-boy, are you coming with me?" "Coming with you?" I repeated. "Where?" The old lady lit a cigarette. "Pluto maybe," she said. "There's a penal colony there, you know, and that ought to tie in nicely with a new crime story. I can see it now ... prison break, stolen rocket ship, fugitives lurking in the interplanetary lanes...." "Grannie," I laughed. "You're incorrigible!"

What settings does the story take place in?

1

“Double Trouble” takes place on the Eighth Moon of Jupiter. Two companies, Interstellar Voice, and Larynx Incorporated are at war with each other to harvest the most Acoustix ore. The companies are located about 10 miles away from each other, and in between them is a space called the Baldric. The Baldric is covered with Flagpole trees. They stand straight up and have a bulbous fruit or vegetable that grows out of the very top. The entire surface is covered in sand, and wind is an ever-present feature of the atmosphere. There are also hundreds of birds that look a lot like cockatoos. The birds look at Xartal’s drawings and then project those images out of their minds. This makes it appear like there are two Grannie Annies or two Billys, when there is really just one. The cockatoos’ ability to project images is similar to their ability to repeat words and phrases that humans say. The characters also venture inside of Larynx Incorporated, the company owned by Jimmy Baker. There are offices, glass doors, counting machines, and report tapes there. The offices are where they package the Acoustix ore to ship it to their customers. The most interesting part of Larynx Incorporated is Jimmy’s invention, an improvement on the visiphone called a visiscreen. Viewers can be taken to a location and the three D image that’s created makes it feel like they are there, experiencing everything along with the group.

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Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net DOUBLE TROUBLE by CARL JACOBI Grannie Annie, that waspish science-fiction writer, was in a jam again. What with red-spot fever, talking cockatoos and flagpole trees, I was running in circles—especially since Grannie became twins every now and then. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] We had left the offices of Interstellar Voice three days ago, Earth time, and now as the immense disc of Jupiter flamed across the sky, entered the outer limits of the Baldric. Grannie Annie strode in the lead, her absurd long-skirted black dress looking as out of place in this desert as the trees. Flagpole trees. They rose straight up like enormous cat-tails, with only a melon-shaped protuberance at the top to show they were a form of vegetation. Everything else was blanketed by the sand and the powerful wind that blew from all quarters. As we reached the first of those trees, Grannie came to a halt. "This is the Baldric all right. If my calculations are right, we've hit it at its narrowest spot." Ezra Karn took a greasy pipe from his lips and spat. "It looks like the rest of this God-forsaken moon," he said, "'ceptin for them sticks." Xartal, the Martian illustrator, said nothing. He was like that, taciturn, speaking only when spoken to. He could be excused this time, however, for this was only our third day on Jupiter's Eighth Moon, and the country was still strange to us. When Annabella C. Flowers, that renowned writer of science fiction, visiphoned me at Crater City, Mars, to meet her here, I had thought she was crazy. But Miss Flowers, known to her friends as Grannie Annie, had always been mildly crazy. If you haven't read her books, you've missed something. She's the author of Lady of the Green Flames , Lady of the Runaway Planet , Lady of the Crimson Space-Beast , and other works of science fiction. Blood-and-thunder as these books are, however, they have one redeeming feature—authenticity of background. Grannie Annie was the original research digger-upper, and when she laid the setting of a yarn on a star of the sixth magnitude, only a transportation-velocity of less than light could prevent her from visiting her "stage" in person. Therefore when she asked me to meet her at the landing field of Interstellar Voice on Jupiter's Eighth Moon, I knew she had another novel in the state of embryo. What I didn't expect was Ezra Karn. He was an old prospector Grannie had met, and he had become so attached to the authoress he now followed her wherever she went. As for Xartal, he was a Martian and was slated to do the illustrations for Grannie's new book. Five minutes after my ship had blasted down, the four of us met in the offices of Interstellar Voice . And then I was shaking hands with Antlers Park, the manager of I. V. himself. "Glad to meet you," he said cordially. "I've just been trying to persuade Miss Flowers not to attempt a trip into the Baldric." "What's the Baldric?" I had asked. Antlers Park flicked the ash from his cheroot and shrugged. "Will you believe me, sir," he said, "when I tell you I've been out here on this forsaken moon five years and don't rightly know myself?" I scowled at that; it didn't make sense. "However, as you perhaps know, the only reason for colonial activities here at all is because of the presence of an ore known as Acoustix. It's no use to the people of Earth but of untold value on Mars. I'm not up on the scientific reasons, but it seems that life on the red planet has developed with a supersonic method of vocal communication. The Martian speaks as the Earthman does, but he amplifies his thoughts' transmission by way of wave lengths as high as three million vibrations per second. The trouble is that by the time the average Martian reaches middle age, his ability to produce those vibrations steadily decreases. Then it was found that this ore, Acoustix, revitalized their sounding apparatus, and the rush was on." "What do you mean?" Park leaned back. "The rush to find more of the ore," he explained. "But up until now this moon is the only place where it can be found. "There are two companies here," he continued, " Interstellar Voice and Larynx Incorporated . Chap by the name of Jimmy Baker runs that. However, the point is, between the properties of these two companies stretches a band or belt which has become known as the Baldric. "There are two principal forms of life in the Baldric; flagpole trees and a species of ornithoid resembling cockatoos. So far no one has crossed the Baldric without trouble." "What sort of trouble?" Grannie Annie had demanded. And when Antlers Park stuttered evasively, the old lady snorted, "Fiddlesticks, I never saw trouble yet that couldn't be explained. We leave in an hour." So now here we were at the outer reaches of the Baldric, four travelers on foot with only the barest necessities in the way of equipment and supplies. I walked forward to get a closer view of one of the flagpole trees. And then abruptly I saw something else. A queer-looking bird squatted there in the sand, looking up at me. Silver in plumage, it resembled a parrot with a crest; and yet it didn't. In some strange way the thing was a hideous caricature. "Look what I found," I yelled. "What I found," said the cockatoo in a very human voice. "Thunder, it talks," I said amazed. "Talks," repeated the bird, blinking its eyes. The cockatoo repeated my last statement again, then rose on its short legs, flapped its wings once and soared off into the sky. Xartal, the Martian illustrator, already had a notebook in his hands and was sketching a likeness of the creature. Ten minutes later we were on the move again. We saw more silver cockatoos and more flagpole trees. Above us, the great disc of Jupiter began to descend toward the horizon. And then all at once Grannie stopped again, this time at the top of a high ridge. She shielded her eyes and stared off into the plain we had just crossed. "Billy-boy," she said to me in a strange voice, "look down there and tell me what you see." I followed the direction of her hand and a shock went through me from head to foot. Down there, slowly toiling across the sand, advanced a party of four persons. In the lead was a little old lady in a black dress. Behind her strode a grizzled Earth man in a flop-brimmed hat, another Earth man, and a Martian. Detail for detail they were a duplicate of ourselves! "A mirage!" said Ezra Karn. But it wasn't a mirage. As the party came closer, we could see that their lips were moving, and their voices became audible. I listened in awe. The duplicate of myself was talking to the duplicate of Grannie Annie, and she was replying in the most natural way. Steadily the four travelers approached. Then, when a dozen yards away, they suddenly faded like a negative exposed to light and disappeared. "What do you make of it?" I said in a hushed voice. Grannie shook her head. "Might be a form of mass hypnosis superinduced by some chemical radiations," she replied. "Whatever it is, we'd better watch our step. There's no telling what might lie ahead." We walked after that with taut nerves and watchful eyes, but we saw no repetition of the "mirage." The wind continued to blow ceaselessly, and the sand seemed to grow more and more powdery. For some time I had fixed my gaze on a dot in the sky which I supposed to be a high-flying cockatoo. As that dot continued to move across the heavens in a single direction, I called Grannie's attention to it. "It's a kite," she nodded. "There should be a car attached to it somewhere." She offered no further explanation, but a quarter of an hour later as we topped another rise a curious elliptical car with a long slanting windscreen came into view. Attached to its hood was a taut wire which slanted up into the sky to connect with the kite. A man was driving and when he saw us, he waved. Five minutes later Grannie was shaking his hand vigorously and mumbling introductions. "This is Jimmy Baker," she said. "He manages Larynx Incorporated , and he's the real reason we're here." I decided I liked Baker the moment I saw him. In his middle thirties, he was tall and lean, with pleasant blue eyes which even his sand goggles could not conceal. "I can't tell you how glad I am you're here, Grannie," he said. "If anybody can help me, you can." Grannie's eyes glittered. "Trouble with the mine laborers?" she questioned. Jimmy Baker nodded. He told his story over the roar of the wind as we headed back across the desert. Occasionally he touched a stud on an electric windlass to which the kite wire was attached. Apparently these adjustments moved planes or fins on the kite and accounted for the car's ability to move in any direction. "If I weren't a realist, I'd say that Larynx Incorporated has been bewitched," he began slowly. "We pay our men high wages and give them excellent living conditions with a vacation on Callisto every year. Up until a short time ago most of them were in excellent health and spirits. Then the Red Spot Fever got them." "Red Spot Fever?" Grannie looked at him curiously. Jimmy Baker nodded. "The first symptoms are a tendency to garrulousness on the part of the patient. Then they disappear." He paused to make an adjustment of the windlass. "They walk out into the Baldric," he continued, "and nothing can stop them. We tried following them, of course, but it was no go. As soon as they realize they're being followed, they stop. But the moment our eyes are turned, they give us the slip." "But surely you must have some idea of where they go," Grannie said. Baker lit a cigarette. "There's all kinds of rumors," he replied, "but none of them will hold water. By the way, there's a cockatoo eyrie ahead of us." I followed his gaze and saw a curious structure suspended between a rude circle of flagpole trees. A strange web-like formation of translucent gauzy material, it was. Fully two hundred cockatoos were perched upon it. They watched us with their mild eyes as we passed, but they didn't move. After that we were rolling up the driveway that led to the offices of Larynx Incorporated . As Jimmy Baker led the way up the inclined ramp, a door in the central building opened, and a man emerged. His face was drawn. "Mr. Baker," he said breathlessly, "seventy-five workers at Shaft Four have headed out into the Baldric." Baker dropped his cigarette and ground his heel on it savagely. "Shaft Four, eh?" he repeated. "That's our principal mine. If the fever spreads there, I'm licked." He motioned us into his office and strode across to a desk. Silent Xartal, the Martian illustrator, took a chair in a corner and got his notebook out, sketching the room's interior. Grannie Annie remained standing. Presently the old lady walked across to the desk and helped herself to the bottle of Martian whiskey there. "There must be ways of stopping this," she said. "Have you called in any physicians? Why don't you call an enforced vacation and send the men away until the plague has died down?" Baker shook his head. "Three doctors from Callisto were here last month. They were as much at loss as I am. As for sending the men away, I may have to do that, but when I do, it means quits. Our company is chartered with Spacolonial, and you know what that means. Failure to produce during a period of thirty days or more, and you lose all rights." A visiphone bell sounded, and Baker walked across to the instrument. A man's face formed in the vision plate. Baker listened, said "Okay" and threw off the switch. "The entire crew of Shaft Four have gone out into the Baldric," he said slowly. There was a large map hanging on the wall back of Baker's desk. Grannie Annie walked across to it and began to study its markings. "Shaft Four is at the outer edge of the Baldric at a point where that corridor is at its widest," she said. Baker looked up. "That's right. We only began operations there a comparatively short time ago. Struck a rich vein of Acoustix that runs deep in. If that vein holds out, we'll double the output of Interstellar Voice , our rival, in a year." Grannie nodded. "I think you and I and Xartal had better take a run up there," she said. "But first I want to see your laboratory." There was no refusing her. Jimmy Baker led the way down to a lower level where a huge laboratory and experimental shop ran the length of the building. Grannie seized a light weight carry-case and began dropping articles into it. A pontocated glass lens, three or four Wellington radite bulbs, each with a spectroscopic filament, a small dynamo that would operate on a kite windlass, and a quantity of wire and other items. The kite car was brought out again, and the old woman, Baker and the Martian took their places in it. Then Jimmy waved, and the car began to roll down the ramp. Not until they had vanished in the desert haze did I sense the loneliness of this outpost. With that loneliness came a sudden sense of foreboding. Had I been a fool to let Grannie go? I thought of her, an old woman who should be in a rocking chair, knitting socks. If anything happened to Annabella C. Flowers, I would never forgive myself and neither would her millions of readers. Ezra Karn and I went back into the office. The old prospector chuckled. "Dang human dynamo. Got more energy than a runaway comet." A connecting door on the far side of the office opened onto a long corridor which ended at a staircase. "Let's look around," I said. We passed down the corridor and climbed the staircase to the second floor. Here were the general offices of Larynx Incorporated , and through glass doors I could see clerks busy with counting machines and report tapes. In another chamber the extremely light Acoustix ore was being packed into big cases and marked for shipment. At the far end a door to a small room stood open. Inside a young man was tilted back in a swivel chair before a complicated instrument panel. "C'mon in," he said, seeing us. "If you want a look at your friends, here they are." He flicked a stud, and the entire wall above the panel underwent a slow change of colors. Those colors whirled kaleidescopically, then coalesced into a three-dimensional scene. It was a scene of a rapidly unfolding desert country as seen from the rear of a kite car. Directly behind the windscreen, backs turned to me, were Jimmy Baker, Grannie, and Xartal. It was as if I were standing directly behind them. "It's Mr. Baker's own invention," the operator said. "An improvement on the visiphone." "Do you mean to say you can follow the movements of that car and its passengers wherever it goes? Can you hear them talk too?" "Sure." The operator turned another dial, and Grannie's falsetto voice entered the room. It stopped abruptly. "The machine uses a lot of power," the operator said, "and as yet we haven't got much." The cloud of anxiety which had wrapped itself about me disappeared somewhat as I viewed this device. At least I could now keep myself posted of Grannie's movements. Karn and I went down to the commissary where we ate our supper. When we returned to Jimmy Baker's office, the visiphone bell was ringing. I went over to it and turned it on, and to my surprise the face of Antlers Park flashed on the screen. "Hello," he said in his friendly way. "I see you arrived all right. Is Miss Flowers there?" "Miss Flowers left with Mr. Baker for Shaft Four," I said. "There's trouble up there. Red spot fever." "Fever, eh?" repeated Park. "That's a shame. Is there anything I can do?" "Tell me," I said, "has your company had any trouble with this plague?" "A little. But up until yesterday the fever's been confined to the other side of the Baldric. We had one partial case, but my chemists gave the chap an antitoxin that seems to have worked. Come to think of it, I might drive over to Shaft Four and give Jimmy Baker the formula. I haven't been out in the Baldric for years, but if you didn't have any trouble, I shouldn't either." We exchanged a few more pleasantries, and then he rang off. In exactly an hour I went upstairs to the visiscreen room. Then once more I was directly behind my friends, listening in on their conversation. The view through the windscreen showed an irregular array of flagpole trees, with the sky dotted by high-flying cockatoos. "There's an eyrie over there," Jimmy Baker was saying. "We might as well camp beside it." Moments later a rude circle of flagpole trees loomed ahead. Across the top of them was stretched a translucent web. Jimmy and Grannie got out of the car and began making camp. Xartal remained in his seat. He was drawing pictures on large pieces of pasteboard, and as I stood there in the visiscreen room, I watched him. There was no doubt about it, the Martian was clever. He would make a few rapid lines on one of the pasteboards, rub it a little to get the proper shading and then go on to the next. In swift rotation likenesses of Ezra Karn, of myself, of Jimmy Baker, and of Antlers Park took form. Ezra spoke over my shoulder. "He's doing scenes for Grannie's new book," he said. "The old lady figures on using the events here for a plot. Look at that damned nosy bird! " A silver cockatoo had alighted on the kite car and was surveying curiously Xartal's work. As each drawing was completed, the bird scanned it with rapt attention. Abruptly it flew to the top of the eyrie, where it seemed to be having a consultation with its bird companions. And then abruptly it happened. The cockatoos took off in mass flight. A group of Earth people suddenly materialized on the eyrie, talking and moving about as if it were the most natural thing in the world. With a shock I saw the likeness of myself; I saw Ezra Karn; and I saw the image of Jimmy Baker. The real Jimmy Baker stood next to Grannie, staring up at this incredible mirage. Grannie let out a whoop. "I've got it!" she said. "Those things we see up there are nothing more than mental images. They're Xartal's drawings!" "Don't you see," the lady continued. "Everything that Xartal put on paper has been seen by one or more of these cockatoos. The cockatoos are like Earth parrots all right, but not only have they the power of copying speech, they also have the ability to recreate a mental image of what they have seen. In other words their brains form a powerful photographic impression of the object. That impression is then transmitted simultaneously in telepathic wavelengths to common foci. That eyrie might be likened to a cinema screen, receiving brain vibrations from a hundred different sources that blend into the light field to form what are apparently three-dimensional images." The Larynx manager nodded slowly. "I see," he said. "But why don't the birds reconstruct images from the actual person. Why use drawings?" "Probably because the drawings are exaggerated in certain details and made a greater impression on their brains," Grannie replied. Up on the eyrie a strange performance was taking place. The duplicate of Grannie Annie was bowing to the duplicate of Jimmy Baker, and the image of Ezra Karn was playing leap frog with the image of Antlers Park. Then abruptly the screen before me blurred and went blank. "Sorry," the operator said. "I've used too much power already. Have to give the generators a chance to build it up again." Nodding, I turned and motioned to Karn. We went back downstairs. "That explains something at any rate," the old prospector said. "But how about that Red spot fever?" On Jimmy Baker's desk was a large file marked: FEVER VICTIMS. I opened it and found it contained the case histories of those men who had been attacked by the strange malady. Reading them over, I was struck by one detail. Each patient had received the first symptoms, not while working in the mines, but while sleeping or lounging in the barracks. Five minutes later Karn and I were striding down a white ramp that led to the nearest barracks. The building came into sight, a low rectangular structure, dome-roofed to withstand the violent winds. Inside double tiers of bunks stretched along either wall. In those bunks some thirty men lay sleeping. The far wall was taken up by a huge window of denvo-quartz. As I stood there, something suddenly caught Ezra Karn's eye. He began to walk toward that window. "Look here," he said. Six feet up on that window a small almost imperceptible button of dull metal had been wedged into an aperture cut in the quartz. The central part of the button appeared to be a powerful lens of some kind, and as I seized it and pulled it loose, I felt the hum of tiny clock work. All at once I had it! Red spot fever. Heat fever from the infra-red rays of Jupiter's great spot. Someone had constructed this lens to concentrate and amplify the power of those rays. The internal clockwork served a double purpose. It opened a shutter, and it rotated the lens slowly so that it played for a time on each of the sleeping men. I slid the metal button in my pocket and left the barracks at a run. Back in the visiscreen room, I snapped to the operator: "Turn it on!" The kite car swam into view in the screen above the instrument panel. I stared with open eyes. Jimmy Baker no longer was in the car, nor was Xartal, the Martian. Grannie Annie was there, but seated at the controls was Antlers Park, the manager of Interstellar Voice. Ezra Karn jabbed my elbow. "Grannie's coming back. I thought she'd be getting sick of this blamed moon." It didn't make sense. In all the years I'd known Annabella C. Flowers, never yet had I seen her desert a case until she had woven the clues and facts to a logical conclusion. "Ezra," I said, "we're going to drive out and meet them. There's something screwy here." Ten minutes later in another kite car we were driving at a fast clip through the powdery sands of the Baldric. And before long we saw another car approaching. It was Grannie. As the car drew up alongside I saw her sitting in her prim way next to Antlers Park. Park said: "We left the others at the mine. Miss Flowers is going back with me to my offices to help me improve the formula for that new antitoxin." He waved his hand, and the car moved off. I watched it as it sped across the desert, and a growing suspicion began to form in my mind. Then, like a knife thrust, the truth struck me. "Ezra!" I yelled, swinging the car. "That wasn't Grannie! That was one of those damned cockatoo images. We've got to catch him." The other car was some distance ahead now. Park looked back and saw us following. He did something to the kite wire, and his car leaped ahead. I threw the speed indicator hard over. Our kite was a huge box affair with a steady powerful pull to the connecting wire. Park's vehicle was drawn by a flat triangular kite that dove and fluttered with each variance of the wind. Steadily we began to close in. The manager of Interstellar Voice turned again, and something glinted in his hand. There was a flash of purple flame, and a round hole appeared in our windscreen inches above Karn's head. "Heat gun!" Ezra yelled. Now we were rocketing over the sand dunes, winding in and out between the flagpole trees. I had to catch that car I told myself. Grannie Annie's very life might be at stake, not to mention the lives of hundreds of mine workers. Again Park took aim and again a hole shattered our windscreen. The wind shifted and blew from another quarter. The box kite soared, but the triangular kite faltered. Taking advantage of Park's loss of speed, I raced alongside. The I. V. manager lifted his weapon frantically. But before he could use it a third time, Ezra Karn had whipped a lariat from his belt and sent it coiling across the intervening space. The thong yanked tight about the manager's throat. Park did the only thing he could do. He shut off power, and the two cars coasted to a halt. Then I was across in the other seat, wrenching the weapon free from his grasp. "What have you done with Miss Flowers?" I demanded. The manager's eyes glittered with fear as he saw my finger tense on the trigger. Weakly he lifted an arm and pointed to the northwest. "Val-ley. Thir-ty miles. Entrance hidden by wall of ... flagpole trees." I leaped into the driver's seat and gave the kite its head. And now the country began to undergo a subtle change. The trees seemed to group themselves in a long flanking corridor in a northwesterly direction, as if to hide some secret that lay beyond. Twice I attempted to penetrate that wall, only to find my way blocked by those curious growths. Then a corridor opened before me; a mile forward and the desert began again. But it was a new desert this time: the sand packed hard as granite, the way ahead utterly devoid of vegetation. In the distance black bulging hills extended to right and left, with a narrow chasm or doorway between. I headed for that entrance, and when I reached it, I shut off power with an exclamation of astonishment. There was a huge chair-shaped rock there, and seated upon it was Grannie Annie. She had a tablet in her hands, and she was writing. "Grannie!" I yelled. "What're you doing here? Where's Mr. Baker?" She rose to her feet and clambered down the rock. "Getting back Jimmy's mine laborers," she said, a twinkle in her eyes. "I see you've got Antlers Park. I'm glad of that. It saves me a lot of trouble." She took off her spectacles and wiped them on her sleeve. "Don't look so fuddled, Billy-boy. Come along, and I'll show you." She led the way through the narrow passage into the valley. A deep gorge, it was, with the black sheer cliffs on either side pressing close. Ten feet forward, I stopped short, staring in amazement. Advancing toward me like a column of infantry came a long line of Larynx miners. They walked slowly, looking straight ahead, moving down the center of the gorge toward the entrance. But there was more! A kite car was drawn up to the side. The windscreen had been removed, and mounted on the hood was a large bullet-like contrivance that looked not unlike a search lamp. A blinding shaft of bluish radiance spewed from its open end. Playing it back and forth upon the marching men were Jimmy Baker and Xartal, the Martian. "Ultra violet," Grannie Annie explained. "The opposite end of the vibratory scale and the only thing that will combat the infra-red rays that cause red spot fever. Those men won't stop walking until they've reached Shaft Four." Grannie Annie told her story during the long ride back to Shaft Four. We drove slowly, keeping the line of marching Larynx miners always ahead of us. Jimmy Baker had struck a new big lode of Acoustix, a lode which if worked successfully would see Larynx Incorporated become a far more powerful exporting concern than Interstellar Voice . Antlers Park didn't want that. It was he or his agents who placed those lens buttons in the Larynx barracks. For he knew that just as Jupiter's great spot was responsible for a climate and atmosphere suitable for an Earthman on this Eighth Moon, so also was that spot a deadly power in itself, capable when its rays were concentrated of causing a fatal sickness. Then suddenly becoming fearful of Grannie's prying, Antlers Park strove to head her off before she reached Shaft Four. He did head her off and managed to lure her and Baker and Xartal into the Shaft barracks where they would be exposed to the rays from the lens button. But Grannie only pretended to contract the plague. Park then attempted to outwit Ezra Karn and me by returning in Jimmy Baker's kite car with a cockatoo image of Grannie. I listened to all this in silence. "But," I said when she had finished, "how did Park manage to have that image created and why did the mine laborers walk out into the Baldric when they contracted the fever?" Grannie Annie frowned. "I'm not sure I can answer the first of those questions," she replied. "You must remember Antlers Park has been on this moon five years and during that time he must have acquainted himself with many of its secrets. Probably he learned long ago just what to do to make a cockatoo create a mental image. "As for the men going out into the Baldric, that was more of Park's diabolical work. In the walls of the barracks besides those lens buttons were also miniature electro-hypnotic plates, with the master controlling unit located in that valley. Park knew that when the miners were in a drugged condition from the effects of the fever they would be susceptible to the machine's lure.... And now, Billy-boy, are you coming with me?" "Coming with you?" I repeated. "Where?" The old lady lit a cigarette. "Pluto maybe," she said. "There's a penal colony there, you know, and that ought to tie in nicely with a new crime story. I can see it now ... prison break, stolen rocket ship, fugitives lurking in the interplanetary lanes...." "Grannie," I laughed. "You're incorrigible!"

What was the relationship like between Jimmy and Grannie?

10

Jimmy Baker is the manager of the Acoustix ore mining company called Larynx Incorporated on Jupiter’s eighth moon. Grannie Annie (AKA Annabella C. Flowers) is a famous science fiction writer, well known for her authentic background research for her novels. She is exploring the eighth moon of Jupiter for her newest novel. Jimmy has knowledge of Grannie’s work and is hoping she can help him solve the mystery of the Red Spot Fever with her excellent problem solving skills. Grannie does not appear to know Jimmy before their meeting in the Baldric. They have a cordial and collaborative relationship through the story that results in solving the mystery.

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Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net DOUBLE TROUBLE by CARL JACOBI Grannie Annie, that waspish science-fiction writer, was in a jam again. What with red-spot fever, talking cockatoos and flagpole trees, I was running in circles—especially since Grannie became twins every now and then. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] We had left the offices of Interstellar Voice three days ago, Earth time, and now as the immense disc of Jupiter flamed across the sky, entered the outer limits of the Baldric. Grannie Annie strode in the lead, her absurd long-skirted black dress looking as out of place in this desert as the trees. Flagpole trees. They rose straight up like enormous cat-tails, with only a melon-shaped protuberance at the top to show they were a form of vegetation. Everything else was blanketed by the sand and the powerful wind that blew from all quarters. As we reached the first of those trees, Grannie came to a halt. "This is the Baldric all right. If my calculations are right, we've hit it at its narrowest spot." Ezra Karn took a greasy pipe from his lips and spat. "It looks like the rest of this God-forsaken moon," he said, "'ceptin for them sticks." Xartal, the Martian illustrator, said nothing. He was like that, taciturn, speaking only when spoken to. He could be excused this time, however, for this was only our third day on Jupiter's Eighth Moon, and the country was still strange to us. When Annabella C. Flowers, that renowned writer of science fiction, visiphoned me at Crater City, Mars, to meet her here, I had thought she was crazy. But Miss Flowers, known to her friends as Grannie Annie, had always been mildly crazy. If you haven't read her books, you've missed something. She's the author of Lady of the Green Flames , Lady of the Runaway Planet , Lady of the Crimson Space-Beast , and other works of science fiction. Blood-and-thunder as these books are, however, they have one redeeming feature—authenticity of background. Grannie Annie was the original research digger-upper, and when she laid the setting of a yarn on a star of the sixth magnitude, only a transportation-velocity of less than light could prevent her from visiting her "stage" in person. Therefore when she asked me to meet her at the landing field of Interstellar Voice on Jupiter's Eighth Moon, I knew she had another novel in the state of embryo. What I didn't expect was Ezra Karn. He was an old prospector Grannie had met, and he had become so attached to the authoress he now followed her wherever she went. As for Xartal, he was a Martian and was slated to do the illustrations for Grannie's new book. Five minutes after my ship had blasted down, the four of us met in the offices of Interstellar Voice . And then I was shaking hands with Antlers Park, the manager of I. V. himself. "Glad to meet you," he said cordially. "I've just been trying to persuade Miss Flowers not to attempt a trip into the Baldric." "What's the Baldric?" I had asked. Antlers Park flicked the ash from his cheroot and shrugged. "Will you believe me, sir," he said, "when I tell you I've been out here on this forsaken moon five years and don't rightly know myself?" I scowled at that; it didn't make sense. "However, as you perhaps know, the only reason for colonial activities here at all is because of the presence of an ore known as Acoustix. It's no use to the people of Earth but of untold value on Mars. I'm not up on the scientific reasons, but it seems that life on the red planet has developed with a supersonic method of vocal communication. The Martian speaks as the Earthman does, but he amplifies his thoughts' transmission by way of wave lengths as high as three million vibrations per second. The trouble is that by the time the average Martian reaches middle age, his ability to produce those vibrations steadily decreases. Then it was found that this ore, Acoustix, revitalized their sounding apparatus, and the rush was on." "What do you mean?" Park leaned back. "The rush to find more of the ore," he explained. "But up until now this moon is the only place where it can be found. "There are two companies here," he continued, " Interstellar Voice and Larynx Incorporated . Chap by the name of Jimmy Baker runs that. However, the point is, between the properties of these two companies stretches a band or belt which has become known as the Baldric. "There are two principal forms of life in the Baldric; flagpole trees and a species of ornithoid resembling cockatoos. So far no one has crossed the Baldric without trouble." "What sort of trouble?" Grannie Annie had demanded. And when Antlers Park stuttered evasively, the old lady snorted, "Fiddlesticks, I never saw trouble yet that couldn't be explained. We leave in an hour." So now here we were at the outer reaches of the Baldric, four travelers on foot with only the barest necessities in the way of equipment and supplies. I walked forward to get a closer view of one of the flagpole trees. And then abruptly I saw something else. A queer-looking bird squatted there in the sand, looking up at me. Silver in plumage, it resembled a parrot with a crest; and yet it didn't. In some strange way the thing was a hideous caricature. "Look what I found," I yelled. "What I found," said the cockatoo in a very human voice. "Thunder, it talks," I said amazed. "Talks," repeated the bird, blinking its eyes. The cockatoo repeated my last statement again, then rose on its short legs, flapped its wings once and soared off into the sky. Xartal, the Martian illustrator, already had a notebook in his hands and was sketching a likeness of the creature. Ten minutes later we were on the move again. We saw more silver cockatoos and more flagpole trees. Above us, the great disc of Jupiter began to descend toward the horizon. And then all at once Grannie stopped again, this time at the top of a high ridge. She shielded her eyes and stared off into the plain we had just crossed. "Billy-boy," she said to me in a strange voice, "look down there and tell me what you see." I followed the direction of her hand and a shock went through me from head to foot. Down there, slowly toiling across the sand, advanced a party of four persons. In the lead was a little old lady in a black dress. Behind her strode a grizzled Earth man in a flop-brimmed hat, another Earth man, and a Martian. Detail for detail they were a duplicate of ourselves! "A mirage!" said Ezra Karn. But it wasn't a mirage. As the party came closer, we could see that their lips were moving, and their voices became audible. I listened in awe. The duplicate of myself was talking to the duplicate of Grannie Annie, and she was replying in the most natural way. Steadily the four travelers approached. Then, when a dozen yards away, they suddenly faded like a negative exposed to light and disappeared. "What do you make of it?" I said in a hushed voice. Grannie shook her head. "Might be a form of mass hypnosis superinduced by some chemical radiations," she replied. "Whatever it is, we'd better watch our step. There's no telling what might lie ahead." We walked after that with taut nerves and watchful eyes, but we saw no repetition of the "mirage." The wind continued to blow ceaselessly, and the sand seemed to grow more and more powdery. For some time I had fixed my gaze on a dot in the sky which I supposed to be a high-flying cockatoo. As that dot continued to move across the heavens in a single direction, I called Grannie's attention to it. "It's a kite," she nodded. "There should be a car attached to it somewhere." She offered no further explanation, but a quarter of an hour later as we topped another rise a curious elliptical car with a long slanting windscreen came into view. Attached to its hood was a taut wire which slanted up into the sky to connect with the kite. A man was driving and when he saw us, he waved. Five minutes later Grannie was shaking his hand vigorously and mumbling introductions. "This is Jimmy Baker," she said. "He manages Larynx Incorporated , and he's the real reason we're here." I decided I liked Baker the moment I saw him. In his middle thirties, he was tall and lean, with pleasant blue eyes which even his sand goggles could not conceal. "I can't tell you how glad I am you're here, Grannie," he said. "If anybody can help me, you can." Grannie's eyes glittered. "Trouble with the mine laborers?" she questioned. Jimmy Baker nodded. He told his story over the roar of the wind as we headed back across the desert. Occasionally he touched a stud on an electric windlass to which the kite wire was attached. Apparently these adjustments moved planes or fins on the kite and accounted for the car's ability to move in any direction. "If I weren't a realist, I'd say that Larynx Incorporated has been bewitched," he began slowly. "We pay our men high wages and give them excellent living conditions with a vacation on Callisto every year. Up until a short time ago most of them were in excellent health and spirits. Then the Red Spot Fever got them." "Red Spot Fever?" Grannie looked at him curiously. Jimmy Baker nodded. "The first symptoms are a tendency to garrulousness on the part of the patient. Then they disappear." He paused to make an adjustment of the windlass. "They walk out into the Baldric," he continued, "and nothing can stop them. We tried following them, of course, but it was no go. As soon as they realize they're being followed, they stop. But the moment our eyes are turned, they give us the slip." "But surely you must have some idea of where they go," Grannie said. Baker lit a cigarette. "There's all kinds of rumors," he replied, "but none of them will hold water. By the way, there's a cockatoo eyrie ahead of us." I followed his gaze and saw a curious structure suspended between a rude circle of flagpole trees. A strange web-like formation of translucent gauzy material, it was. Fully two hundred cockatoos were perched upon it. They watched us with their mild eyes as we passed, but they didn't move. After that we were rolling up the driveway that led to the offices of Larynx Incorporated . As Jimmy Baker led the way up the inclined ramp, a door in the central building opened, and a man emerged. His face was drawn. "Mr. Baker," he said breathlessly, "seventy-five workers at Shaft Four have headed out into the Baldric." Baker dropped his cigarette and ground his heel on it savagely. "Shaft Four, eh?" he repeated. "That's our principal mine. If the fever spreads there, I'm licked." He motioned us into his office and strode across to a desk. Silent Xartal, the Martian illustrator, took a chair in a corner and got his notebook out, sketching the room's interior. Grannie Annie remained standing. Presently the old lady walked across to the desk and helped herself to the bottle of Martian whiskey there. "There must be ways of stopping this," she said. "Have you called in any physicians? Why don't you call an enforced vacation and send the men away until the plague has died down?" Baker shook his head. "Three doctors from Callisto were here last month. They were as much at loss as I am. As for sending the men away, I may have to do that, but when I do, it means quits. Our company is chartered with Spacolonial, and you know what that means. Failure to produce during a period of thirty days or more, and you lose all rights." A visiphone bell sounded, and Baker walked across to the instrument. A man's face formed in the vision plate. Baker listened, said "Okay" and threw off the switch. "The entire crew of Shaft Four have gone out into the Baldric," he said slowly. There was a large map hanging on the wall back of Baker's desk. Grannie Annie walked across to it and began to study its markings. "Shaft Four is at the outer edge of the Baldric at a point where that corridor is at its widest," she said. Baker looked up. "That's right. We only began operations there a comparatively short time ago. Struck a rich vein of Acoustix that runs deep in. If that vein holds out, we'll double the output of Interstellar Voice , our rival, in a year." Grannie nodded. "I think you and I and Xartal had better take a run up there," she said. "But first I want to see your laboratory." There was no refusing her. Jimmy Baker led the way down to a lower level where a huge laboratory and experimental shop ran the length of the building. Grannie seized a light weight carry-case and began dropping articles into it. A pontocated glass lens, three or four Wellington radite bulbs, each with a spectroscopic filament, a small dynamo that would operate on a kite windlass, and a quantity of wire and other items. The kite car was brought out again, and the old woman, Baker and the Martian took their places in it. Then Jimmy waved, and the car began to roll down the ramp. Not until they had vanished in the desert haze did I sense the loneliness of this outpost. With that loneliness came a sudden sense of foreboding. Had I been a fool to let Grannie go? I thought of her, an old woman who should be in a rocking chair, knitting socks. If anything happened to Annabella C. Flowers, I would never forgive myself and neither would her millions of readers. Ezra Karn and I went back into the office. The old prospector chuckled. "Dang human dynamo. Got more energy than a runaway comet." A connecting door on the far side of the office opened onto a long corridor which ended at a staircase. "Let's look around," I said. We passed down the corridor and climbed the staircase to the second floor. Here were the general offices of Larynx Incorporated , and through glass doors I could see clerks busy with counting machines and report tapes. In another chamber the extremely light Acoustix ore was being packed into big cases and marked for shipment. At the far end a door to a small room stood open. Inside a young man was tilted back in a swivel chair before a complicated instrument panel. "C'mon in," he said, seeing us. "If you want a look at your friends, here they are." He flicked a stud, and the entire wall above the panel underwent a slow change of colors. Those colors whirled kaleidescopically, then coalesced into a three-dimensional scene. It was a scene of a rapidly unfolding desert country as seen from the rear of a kite car. Directly behind the windscreen, backs turned to me, were Jimmy Baker, Grannie, and Xartal. It was as if I were standing directly behind them. "It's Mr. Baker's own invention," the operator said. "An improvement on the visiphone." "Do you mean to say you can follow the movements of that car and its passengers wherever it goes? Can you hear them talk too?" "Sure." The operator turned another dial, and Grannie's falsetto voice entered the room. It stopped abruptly. "The machine uses a lot of power," the operator said, "and as yet we haven't got much." The cloud of anxiety which had wrapped itself about me disappeared somewhat as I viewed this device. At least I could now keep myself posted of Grannie's movements. Karn and I went down to the commissary where we ate our supper. When we returned to Jimmy Baker's office, the visiphone bell was ringing. I went over to it and turned it on, and to my surprise the face of Antlers Park flashed on the screen. "Hello," he said in his friendly way. "I see you arrived all right. Is Miss Flowers there?" "Miss Flowers left with Mr. Baker for Shaft Four," I said. "There's trouble up there. Red spot fever." "Fever, eh?" repeated Park. "That's a shame. Is there anything I can do?" "Tell me," I said, "has your company had any trouble with this plague?" "A little. But up until yesterday the fever's been confined to the other side of the Baldric. We had one partial case, but my chemists gave the chap an antitoxin that seems to have worked. Come to think of it, I might drive over to Shaft Four and give Jimmy Baker the formula. I haven't been out in the Baldric for years, but if you didn't have any trouble, I shouldn't either." We exchanged a few more pleasantries, and then he rang off. In exactly an hour I went upstairs to the visiscreen room. Then once more I was directly behind my friends, listening in on their conversation. The view through the windscreen showed an irregular array of flagpole trees, with the sky dotted by high-flying cockatoos. "There's an eyrie over there," Jimmy Baker was saying. "We might as well camp beside it." Moments later a rude circle of flagpole trees loomed ahead. Across the top of them was stretched a translucent web. Jimmy and Grannie got out of the car and began making camp. Xartal remained in his seat. He was drawing pictures on large pieces of pasteboard, and as I stood there in the visiscreen room, I watched him. There was no doubt about it, the Martian was clever. He would make a few rapid lines on one of the pasteboards, rub it a little to get the proper shading and then go on to the next. In swift rotation likenesses of Ezra Karn, of myself, of Jimmy Baker, and of Antlers Park took form. Ezra spoke over my shoulder. "He's doing scenes for Grannie's new book," he said. "The old lady figures on using the events here for a plot. Look at that damned nosy bird! " A silver cockatoo had alighted on the kite car and was surveying curiously Xartal's work. As each drawing was completed, the bird scanned it with rapt attention. Abruptly it flew to the top of the eyrie, where it seemed to be having a consultation with its bird companions. And then abruptly it happened. The cockatoos took off in mass flight. A group of Earth people suddenly materialized on the eyrie, talking and moving about as if it were the most natural thing in the world. With a shock I saw the likeness of myself; I saw Ezra Karn; and I saw the image of Jimmy Baker. The real Jimmy Baker stood next to Grannie, staring up at this incredible mirage. Grannie let out a whoop. "I've got it!" she said. "Those things we see up there are nothing more than mental images. They're Xartal's drawings!" "Don't you see," the lady continued. "Everything that Xartal put on paper has been seen by one or more of these cockatoos. The cockatoos are like Earth parrots all right, but not only have they the power of copying speech, they also have the ability to recreate a mental image of what they have seen. In other words their brains form a powerful photographic impression of the object. That impression is then transmitted simultaneously in telepathic wavelengths to common foci. That eyrie might be likened to a cinema screen, receiving brain vibrations from a hundred different sources that blend into the light field to form what are apparently three-dimensional images." The Larynx manager nodded slowly. "I see," he said. "But why don't the birds reconstruct images from the actual person. Why use drawings?" "Probably because the drawings are exaggerated in certain details and made a greater impression on their brains," Grannie replied. Up on the eyrie a strange performance was taking place. The duplicate of Grannie Annie was bowing to the duplicate of Jimmy Baker, and the image of Ezra Karn was playing leap frog with the image of Antlers Park. Then abruptly the screen before me blurred and went blank. "Sorry," the operator said. "I've used too much power already. Have to give the generators a chance to build it up again." Nodding, I turned and motioned to Karn. We went back downstairs. "That explains something at any rate," the old prospector said. "But how about that Red spot fever?" On Jimmy Baker's desk was a large file marked: FEVER VICTIMS. I opened it and found it contained the case histories of those men who had been attacked by the strange malady. Reading them over, I was struck by one detail. Each patient had received the first symptoms, not while working in the mines, but while sleeping or lounging in the barracks. Five minutes later Karn and I were striding down a white ramp that led to the nearest barracks. The building came into sight, a low rectangular structure, dome-roofed to withstand the violent winds. Inside double tiers of bunks stretched along either wall. In those bunks some thirty men lay sleeping. The far wall was taken up by a huge window of denvo-quartz. As I stood there, something suddenly caught Ezra Karn's eye. He began to walk toward that window. "Look here," he said. Six feet up on that window a small almost imperceptible button of dull metal had been wedged into an aperture cut in the quartz. The central part of the button appeared to be a powerful lens of some kind, and as I seized it and pulled it loose, I felt the hum of tiny clock work. All at once I had it! Red spot fever. Heat fever from the infra-red rays of Jupiter's great spot. Someone had constructed this lens to concentrate and amplify the power of those rays. The internal clockwork served a double purpose. It opened a shutter, and it rotated the lens slowly so that it played for a time on each of the sleeping men. I slid the metal button in my pocket and left the barracks at a run. Back in the visiscreen room, I snapped to the operator: "Turn it on!" The kite car swam into view in the screen above the instrument panel. I stared with open eyes. Jimmy Baker no longer was in the car, nor was Xartal, the Martian. Grannie Annie was there, but seated at the controls was Antlers Park, the manager of Interstellar Voice. Ezra Karn jabbed my elbow. "Grannie's coming back. I thought she'd be getting sick of this blamed moon." It didn't make sense. In all the years I'd known Annabella C. Flowers, never yet had I seen her desert a case until she had woven the clues and facts to a logical conclusion. "Ezra," I said, "we're going to drive out and meet them. There's something screwy here." Ten minutes later in another kite car we were driving at a fast clip through the powdery sands of the Baldric. And before long we saw another car approaching. It was Grannie. As the car drew up alongside I saw her sitting in her prim way next to Antlers Park. Park said: "We left the others at the mine. Miss Flowers is going back with me to my offices to help me improve the formula for that new antitoxin." He waved his hand, and the car moved off. I watched it as it sped across the desert, and a growing suspicion began to form in my mind. Then, like a knife thrust, the truth struck me. "Ezra!" I yelled, swinging the car. "That wasn't Grannie! That was one of those damned cockatoo images. We've got to catch him." The other car was some distance ahead now. Park looked back and saw us following. He did something to the kite wire, and his car leaped ahead. I threw the speed indicator hard over. Our kite was a huge box affair with a steady powerful pull to the connecting wire. Park's vehicle was drawn by a flat triangular kite that dove and fluttered with each variance of the wind. Steadily we began to close in. The manager of Interstellar Voice turned again, and something glinted in his hand. There was a flash of purple flame, and a round hole appeared in our windscreen inches above Karn's head. "Heat gun!" Ezra yelled. Now we were rocketing over the sand dunes, winding in and out between the flagpole trees. I had to catch that car I told myself. Grannie Annie's very life might be at stake, not to mention the lives of hundreds of mine workers. Again Park took aim and again a hole shattered our windscreen. The wind shifted and blew from another quarter. The box kite soared, but the triangular kite faltered. Taking advantage of Park's loss of speed, I raced alongside. The I. V. manager lifted his weapon frantically. But before he could use it a third time, Ezra Karn had whipped a lariat from his belt and sent it coiling across the intervening space. The thong yanked tight about the manager's throat. Park did the only thing he could do. He shut off power, and the two cars coasted to a halt. Then I was across in the other seat, wrenching the weapon free from his grasp. "What have you done with Miss Flowers?" I demanded. The manager's eyes glittered with fear as he saw my finger tense on the trigger. Weakly he lifted an arm and pointed to the northwest. "Val-ley. Thir-ty miles. Entrance hidden by wall of ... flagpole trees." I leaped into the driver's seat and gave the kite its head. And now the country began to undergo a subtle change. The trees seemed to group themselves in a long flanking corridor in a northwesterly direction, as if to hide some secret that lay beyond. Twice I attempted to penetrate that wall, only to find my way blocked by those curious growths. Then a corridor opened before me; a mile forward and the desert began again. But it was a new desert this time: the sand packed hard as granite, the way ahead utterly devoid of vegetation. In the distance black bulging hills extended to right and left, with a narrow chasm or doorway between. I headed for that entrance, and when I reached it, I shut off power with an exclamation of astonishment. There was a huge chair-shaped rock there, and seated upon it was Grannie Annie. She had a tablet in her hands, and she was writing. "Grannie!" I yelled. "What're you doing here? Where's Mr. Baker?" She rose to her feet and clambered down the rock. "Getting back Jimmy's mine laborers," she said, a twinkle in her eyes. "I see you've got Antlers Park. I'm glad of that. It saves me a lot of trouble." She took off her spectacles and wiped them on her sleeve. "Don't look so fuddled, Billy-boy. Come along, and I'll show you." She led the way through the narrow passage into the valley. A deep gorge, it was, with the black sheer cliffs on either side pressing close. Ten feet forward, I stopped short, staring in amazement. Advancing toward me like a column of infantry came a long line of Larynx miners. They walked slowly, looking straight ahead, moving down the center of the gorge toward the entrance. But there was more! A kite car was drawn up to the side. The windscreen had been removed, and mounted on the hood was a large bullet-like contrivance that looked not unlike a search lamp. A blinding shaft of bluish radiance spewed from its open end. Playing it back and forth upon the marching men were Jimmy Baker and Xartal, the Martian. "Ultra violet," Grannie Annie explained. "The opposite end of the vibratory scale and the only thing that will combat the infra-red rays that cause red spot fever. Those men won't stop walking until they've reached Shaft Four." Grannie Annie told her story during the long ride back to Shaft Four. We drove slowly, keeping the line of marching Larynx miners always ahead of us. Jimmy Baker had struck a new big lode of Acoustix, a lode which if worked successfully would see Larynx Incorporated become a far more powerful exporting concern than Interstellar Voice . Antlers Park didn't want that. It was he or his agents who placed those lens buttons in the Larynx barracks. For he knew that just as Jupiter's great spot was responsible for a climate and atmosphere suitable for an Earthman on this Eighth Moon, so also was that spot a deadly power in itself, capable when its rays were concentrated of causing a fatal sickness. Then suddenly becoming fearful of Grannie's prying, Antlers Park strove to head her off before she reached Shaft Four. He did head her off and managed to lure her and Baker and Xartal into the Shaft barracks where they would be exposed to the rays from the lens button. But Grannie only pretended to contract the plague. Park then attempted to outwit Ezra Karn and me by returning in Jimmy Baker's kite car with a cockatoo image of Grannie. I listened to all this in silence. "But," I said when she had finished, "how did Park manage to have that image created and why did the mine laborers walk out into the Baldric when they contracted the fever?" Grannie Annie frowned. "I'm not sure I can answer the first of those questions," she replied. "You must remember Antlers Park has been on this moon five years and during that time he must have acquainted himself with many of its secrets. Probably he learned long ago just what to do to make a cockatoo create a mental image. "As for the men going out into the Baldric, that was more of Park's diabolical work. In the walls of the barracks besides those lens buttons were also miniature electro-hypnotic plates, with the master controlling unit located in that valley. Park knew that when the miners were in a drugged condition from the effects of the fever they would be susceptible to the machine's lure.... And now, Billy-boy, are you coming with me?" "Coming with you?" I repeated. "Where?" The old lady lit a cigarette. "Pluto maybe," she said. "There's a penal colony there, you know, and that ought to tie in nicely with a new crime story. I can see it now ... prison break, stolen rocket ship, fugitives lurking in the interplanetary lanes...." "Grannie," I laughed. "You're incorrigible!"

What was the relationship like between Jimmy and Grannie?

3

Jimmy Baker is the director of Larynx Incorporated, one of the companies on Jupiter's Eighth Moon that aims to collect Acoustix ore. Visiting Jimmy was Grannie's primary reason for traveling to the Baldric, and Jimmy seems to need her help. In fact, he thinks she is the only one who might be able to solve his problem. Grannie is excited to help, and is intrigued by the puzzle he has for her. The two of them seem to work well together; Jimmy trusts Grannie to go with him to investigate the issues, and Grannie has some good ideas for him. In the end, they are able to uncover the issue and find a way to help Jimmy's workers.

63442

Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net DOUBLE TROUBLE by CARL JACOBI Grannie Annie, that waspish science-fiction writer, was in a jam again. What with red-spot fever, talking cockatoos and flagpole trees, I was running in circles—especially since Grannie became twins every now and then. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] We had left the offices of Interstellar Voice three days ago, Earth time, and now as the immense disc of Jupiter flamed across the sky, entered the outer limits of the Baldric. Grannie Annie strode in the lead, her absurd long-skirted black dress looking as out of place in this desert as the trees. Flagpole trees. They rose straight up like enormous cat-tails, with only a melon-shaped protuberance at the top to show they were a form of vegetation. Everything else was blanketed by the sand and the powerful wind that blew from all quarters. As we reached the first of those trees, Grannie came to a halt. "This is the Baldric all right. If my calculations are right, we've hit it at its narrowest spot." Ezra Karn took a greasy pipe from his lips and spat. "It looks like the rest of this God-forsaken moon," he said, "'ceptin for them sticks." Xartal, the Martian illustrator, said nothing. He was like that, taciturn, speaking only when spoken to. He could be excused this time, however, for this was only our third day on Jupiter's Eighth Moon, and the country was still strange to us. When Annabella C. Flowers, that renowned writer of science fiction, visiphoned me at Crater City, Mars, to meet her here, I had thought she was crazy. But Miss Flowers, known to her friends as Grannie Annie, had always been mildly crazy. If you haven't read her books, you've missed something. She's the author of Lady of the Green Flames , Lady of the Runaway Planet , Lady of the Crimson Space-Beast , and other works of science fiction. Blood-and-thunder as these books are, however, they have one redeeming feature—authenticity of background. Grannie Annie was the original research digger-upper, and when she laid the setting of a yarn on a star of the sixth magnitude, only a transportation-velocity of less than light could prevent her from visiting her "stage" in person. Therefore when she asked me to meet her at the landing field of Interstellar Voice on Jupiter's Eighth Moon, I knew she had another novel in the state of embryo. What I didn't expect was Ezra Karn. He was an old prospector Grannie had met, and he had become so attached to the authoress he now followed her wherever she went. As for Xartal, he was a Martian and was slated to do the illustrations for Grannie's new book. Five minutes after my ship had blasted down, the four of us met in the offices of Interstellar Voice . And then I was shaking hands with Antlers Park, the manager of I. V. himself. "Glad to meet you," he said cordially. "I've just been trying to persuade Miss Flowers not to attempt a trip into the Baldric." "What's the Baldric?" I had asked. Antlers Park flicked the ash from his cheroot and shrugged. "Will you believe me, sir," he said, "when I tell you I've been out here on this forsaken moon five years and don't rightly know myself?" I scowled at that; it didn't make sense. "However, as you perhaps know, the only reason for colonial activities here at all is because of the presence of an ore known as Acoustix. It's no use to the people of Earth but of untold value on Mars. I'm not up on the scientific reasons, but it seems that life on the red planet has developed with a supersonic method of vocal communication. The Martian speaks as the Earthman does, but he amplifies his thoughts' transmission by way of wave lengths as high as three million vibrations per second. The trouble is that by the time the average Martian reaches middle age, his ability to produce those vibrations steadily decreases. Then it was found that this ore, Acoustix, revitalized their sounding apparatus, and the rush was on." "What do you mean?" Park leaned back. "The rush to find more of the ore," he explained. "But up until now this moon is the only place where it can be found. "There are two companies here," he continued, " Interstellar Voice and Larynx Incorporated . Chap by the name of Jimmy Baker runs that. However, the point is, between the properties of these two companies stretches a band or belt which has become known as the Baldric. "There are two principal forms of life in the Baldric; flagpole trees and a species of ornithoid resembling cockatoos. So far no one has crossed the Baldric without trouble." "What sort of trouble?" Grannie Annie had demanded. And when Antlers Park stuttered evasively, the old lady snorted, "Fiddlesticks, I never saw trouble yet that couldn't be explained. We leave in an hour." So now here we were at the outer reaches of the Baldric, four travelers on foot with only the barest necessities in the way of equipment and supplies. I walked forward to get a closer view of one of the flagpole trees. And then abruptly I saw something else. A queer-looking bird squatted there in the sand, looking up at me. Silver in plumage, it resembled a parrot with a crest; and yet it didn't. In some strange way the thing was a hideous caricature. "Look what I found," I yelled. "What I found," said the cockatoo in a very human voice. "Thunder, it talks," I said amazed. "Talks," repeated the bird, blinking its eyes. The cockatoo repeated my last statement again, then rose on its short legs, flapped its wings once and soared off into the sky. Xartal, the Martian illustrator, already had a notebook in his hands and was sketching a likeness of the creature. Ten minutes later we were on the move again. We saw more silver cockatoos and more flagpole trees. Above us, the great disc of Jupiter began to descend toward the horizon. And then all at once Grannie stopped again, this time at the top of a high ridge. She shielded her eyes and stared off into the plain we had just crossed. "Billy-boy," she said to me in a strange voice, "look down there and tell me what you see." I followed the direction of her hand and a shock went through me from head to foot. Down there, slowly toiling across the sand, advanced a party of four persons. In the lead was a little old lady in a black dress. Behind her strode a grizzled Earth man in a flop-brimmed hat, another Earth man, and a Martian. Detail for detail they were a duplicate of ourselves! "A mirage!" said Ezra Karn. But it wasn't a mirage. As the party came closer, we could see that their lips were moving, and their voices became audible. I listened in awe. The duplicate of myself was talking to the duplicate of Grannie Annie, and she was replying in the most natural way. Steadily the four travelers approached. Then, when a dozen yards away, they suddenly faded like a negative exposed to light and disappeared. "What do you make of it?" I said in a hushed voice. Grannie shook her head. "Might be a form of mass hypnosis superinduced by some chemical radiations," she replied. "Whatever it is, we'd better watch our step. There's no telling what might lie ahead." We walked after that with taut nerves and watchful eyes, but we saw no repetition of the "mirage." The wind continued to blow ceaselessly, and the sand seemed to grow more and more powdery. For some time I had fixed my gaze on a dot in the sky which I supposed to be a high-flying cockatoo. As that dot continued to move across the heavens in a single direction, I called Grannie's attention to it. "It's a kite," she nodded. "There should be a car attached to it somewhere." She offered no further explanation, but a quarter of an hour later as we topped another rise a curious elliptical car with a long slanting windscreen came into view. Attached to its hood was a taut wire which slanted up into the sky to connect with the kite. A man was driving and when he saw us, he waved. Five minutes later Grannie was shaking his hand vigorously and mumbling introductions. "This is Jimmy Baker," she said. "He manages Larynx Incorporated , and he's the real reason we're here." I decided I liked Baker the moment I saw him. In his middle thirties, he was tall and lean, with pleasant blue eyes which even his sand goggles could not conceal. "I can't tell you how glad I am you're here, Grannie," he said. "If anybody can help me, you can." Grannie's eyes glittered. "Trouble with the mine laborers?" she questioned. Jimmy Baker nodded. He told his story over the roar of the wind as we headed back across the desert. Occasionally he touched a stud on an electric windlass to which the kite wire was attached. Apparently these adjustments moved planes or fins on the kite and accounted for the car's ability to move in any direction. "If I weren't a realist, I'd say that Larynx Incorporated has been bewitched," he began slowly. "We pay our men high wages and give them excellent living conditions with a vacation on Callisto every year. Up until a short time ago most of them were in excellent health and spirits. Then the Red Spot Fever got them." "Red Spot Fever?" Grannie looked at him curiously. Jimmy Baker nodded. "The first symptoms are a tendency to garrulousness on the part of the patient. Then they disappear." He paused to make an adjustment of the windlass. "They walk out into the Baldric," he continued, "and nothing can stop them. We tried following them, of course, but it was no go. As soon as they realize they're being followed, they stop. But the moment our eyes are turned, they give us the slip." "But surely you must have some idea of where they go," Grannie said. Baker lit a cigarette. "There's all kinds of rumors," he replied, "but none of them will hold water. By the way, there's a cockatoo eyrie ahead of us." I followed his gaze and saw a curious structure suspended between a rude circle of flagpole trees. A strange web-like formation of translucent gauzy material, it was. Fully two hundred cockatoos were perched upon it. They watched us with their mild eyes as we passed, but they didn't move. After that we were rolling up the driveway that led to the offices of Larynx Incorporated . As Jimmy Baker led the way up the inclined ramp, a door in the central building opened, and a man emerged. His face was drawn. "Mr. Baker," he said breathlessly, "seventy-five workers at Shaft Four have headed out into the Baldric." Baker dropped his cigarette and ground his heel on it savagely. "Shaft Four, eh?" he repeated. "That's our principal mine. If the fever spreads there, I'm licked." He motioned us into his office and strode across to a desk. Silent Xartal, the Martian illustrator, took a chair in a corner and got his notebook out, sketching the room's interior. Grannie Annie remained standing. Presently the old lady walked across to the desk and helped herself to the bottle of Martian whiskey there. "There must be ways of stopping this," she said. "Have you called in any physicians? Why don't you call an enforced vacation and send the men away until the plague has died down?" Baker shook his head. "Three doctors from Callisto were here last month. They were as much at loss as I am. As for sending the men away, I may have to do that, but when I do, it means quits. Our company is chartered with Spacolonial, and you know what that means. Failure to produce during a period of thirty days or more, and you lose all rights." A visiphone bell sounded, and Baker walked across to the instrument. A man's face formed in the vision plate. Baker listened, said "Okay" and threw off the switch. "The entire crew of Shaft Four have gone out into the Baldric," he said slowly. There was a large map hanging on the wall back of Baker's desk. Grannie Annie walked across to it and began to study its markings. "Shaft Four is at the outer edge of the Baldric at a point where that corridor is at its widest," she said. Baker looked up. "That's right. We only began operations there a comparatively short time ago. Struck a rich vein of Acoustix that runs deep in. If that vein holds out, we'll double the output of Interstellar Voice , our rival, in a year." Grannie nodded. "I think you and I and Xartal had better take a run up there," she said. "But first I want to see your laboratory." There was no refusing her. Jimmy Baker led the way down to a lower level where a huge laboratory and experimental shop ran the length of the building. Grannie seized a light weight carry-case and began dropping articles into it. A pontocated glass lens, three or four Wellington radite bulbs, each with a spectroscopic filament, a small dynamo that would operate on a kite windlass, and a quantity of wire and other items. The kite car was brought out again, and the old woman, Baker and the Martian took their places in it. Then Jimmy waved, and the car began to roll down the ramp. Not until they had vanished in the desert haze did I sense the loneliness of this outpost. With that loneliness came a sudden sense of foreboding. Had I been a fool to let Grannie go? I thought of her, an old woman who should be in a rocking chair, knitting socks. If anything happened to Annabella C. Flowers, I would never forgive myself and neither would her millions of readers. Ezra Karn and I went back into the office. The old prospector chuckled. "Dang human dynamo. Got more energy than a runaway comet." A connecting door on the far side of the office opened onto a long corridor which ended at a staircase. "Let's look around," I said. We passed down the corridor and climbed the staircase to the second floor. Here were the general offices of Larynx Incorporated , and through glass doors I could see clerks busy with counting machines and report tapes. In another chamber the extremely light Acoustix ore was being packed into big cases and marked for shipment. At the far end a door to a small room stood open. Inside a young man was tilted back in a swivel chair before a complicated instrument panel. "C'mon in," he said, seeing us. "If you want a look at your friends, here they are." He flicked a stud, and the entire wall above the panel underwent a slow change of colors. Those colors whirled kaleidescopically, then coalesced into a three-dimensional scene. It was a scene of a rapidly unfolding desert country as seen from the rear of a kite car. Directly behind the windscreen, backs turned to me, were Jimmy Baker, Grannie, and Xartal. It was as if I were standing directly behind them. "It's Mr. Baker's own invention," the operator said. "An improvement on the visiphone." "Do you mean to say you can follow the movements of that car and its passengers wherever it goes? Can you hear them talk too?" "Sure." The operator turned another dial, and Grannie's falsetto voice entered the room. It stopped abruptly. "The machine uses a lot of power," the operator said, "and as yet we haven't got much." The cloud of anxiety which had wrapped itself about me disappeared somewhat as I viewed this device. At least I could now keep myself posted of Grannie's movements. Karn and I went down to the commissary where we ate our supper. When we returned to Jimmy Baker's office, the visiphone bell was ringing. I went over to it and turned it on, and to my surprise the face of Antlers Park flashed on the screen. "Hello," he said in his friendly way. "I see you arrived all right. Is Miss Flowers there?" "Miss Flowers left with Mr. Baker for Shaft Four," I said. "There's trouble up there. Red spot fever." "Fever, eh?" repeated Park. "That's a shame. Is there anything I can do?" "Tell me," I said, "has your company had any trouble with this plague?" "A little. But up until yesterday the fever's been confined to the other side of the Baldric. We had one partial case, but my chemists gave the chap an antitoxin that seems to have worked. Come to think of it, I might drive over to Shaft Four and give Jimmy Baker the formula. I haven't been out in the Baldric for years, but if you didn't have any trouble, I shouldn't either." We exchanged a few more pleasantries, and then he rang off. In exactly an hour I went upstairs to the visiscreen room. Then once more I was directly behind my friends, listening in on their conversation. The view through the windscreen showed an irregular array of flagpole trees, with the sky dotted by high-flying cockatoos. "There's an eyrie over there," Jimmy Baker was saying. "We might as well camp beside it." Moments later a rude circle of flagpole trees loomed ahead. Across the top of them was stretched a translucent web. Jimmy and Grannie got out of the car and began making camp. Xartal remained in his seat. He was drawing pictures on large pieces of pasteboard, and as I stood there in the visiscreen room, I watched him. There was no doubt about it, the Martian was clever. He would make a few rapid lines on one of the pasteboards, rub it a little to get the proper shading and then go on to the next. In swift rotation likenesses of Ezra Karn, of myself, of Jimmy Baker, and of Antlers Park took form. Ezra spoke over my shoulder. "He's doing scenes for Grannie's new book," he said. "The old lady figures on using the events here for a plot. Look at that damned nosy bird! " A silver cockatoo had alighted on the kite car and was surveying curiously Xartal's work. As each drawing was completed, the bird scanned it with rapt attention. Abruptly it flew to the top of the eyrie, where it seemed to be having a consultation with its bird companions. And then abruptly it happened. The cockatoos took off in mass flight. A group of Earth people suddenly materialized on the eyrie, talking and moving about as if it were the most natural thing in the world. With a shock I saw the likeness of myself; I saw Ezra Karn; and I saw the image of Jimmy Baker. The real Jimmy Baker stood next to Grannie, staring up at this incredible mirage. Grannie let out a whoop. "I've got it!" she said. "Those things we see up there are nothing more than mental images. They're Xartal's drawings!" "Don't you see," the lady continued. "Everything that Xartal put on paper has been seen by one or more of these cockatoos. The cockatoos are like Earth parrots all right, but not only have they the power of copying speech, they also have the ability to recreate a mental image of what they have seen. In other words their brains form a powerful photographic impression of the object. That impression is then transmitted simultaneously in telepathic wavelengths to common foci. That eyrie might be likened to a cinema screen, receiving brain vibrations from a hundred different sources that blend into the light field to form what are apparently three-dimensional images." The Larynx manager nodded slowly. "I see," he said. "But why don't the birds reconstruct images from the actual person. Why use drawings?" "Probably because the drawings are exaggerated in certain details and made a greater impression on their brains," Grannie replied. Up on the eyrie a strange performance was taking place. The duplicate of Grannie Annie was bowing to the duplicate of Jimmy Baker, and the image of Ezra Karn was playing leap frog with the image of Antlers Park. Then abruptly the screen before me blurred and went blank. "Sorry," the operator said. "I've used too much power already. Have to give the generators a chance to build it up again." Nodding, I turned and motioned to Karn. We went back downstairs. "That explains something at any rate," the old prospector said. "But how about that Red spot fever?" On Jimmy Baker's desk was a large file marked: FEVER VICTIMS. I opened it and found it contained the case histories of those men who had been attacked by the strange malady. Reading them over, I was struck by one detail. Each patient had received the first symptoms, not while working in the mines, but while sleeping or lounging in the barracks. Five minutes later Karn and I were striding down a white ramp that led to the nearest barracks. The building came into sight, a low rectangular structure, dome-roofed to withstand the violent winds. Inside double tiers of bunks stretched along either wall. In those bunks some thirty men lay sleeping. The far wall was taken up by a huge window of denvo-quartz. As I stood there, something suddenly caught Ezra Karn's eye. He began to walk toward that window. "Look here," he said. Six feet up on that window a small almost imperceptible button of dull metal had been wedged into an aperture cut in the quartz. The central part of the button appeared to be a powerful lens of some kind, and as I seized it and pulled it loose, I felt the hum of tiny clock work. All at once I had it! Red spot fever. Heat fever from the infra-red rays of Jupiter's great spot. Someone had constructed this lens to concentrate and amplify the power of those rays. The internal clockwork served a double purpose. It opened a shutter, and it rotated the lens slowly so that it played for a time on each of the sleeping men. I slid the metal button in my pocket and left the barracks at a run. Back in the visiscreen room, I snapped to the operator: "Turn it on!" The kite car swam into view in the screen above the instrument panel. I stared with open eyes. Jimmy Baker no longer was in the car, nor was Xartal, the Martian. Grannie Annie was there, but seated at the controls was Antlers Park, the manager of Interstellar Voice. Ezra Karn jabbed my elbow. "Grannie's coming back. I thought she'd be getting sick of this blamed moon." It didn't make sense. In all the years I'd known Annabella C. Flowers, never yet had I seen her desert a case until she had woven the clues and facts to a logical conclusion. "Ezra," I said, "we're going to drive out and meet them. There's something screwy here." Ten minutes later in another kite car we were driving at a fast clip through the powdery sands of the Baldric. And before long we saw another car approaching. It was Grannie. As the car drew up alongside I saw her sitting in her prim way next to Antlers Park. Park said: "We left the others at the mine. Miss Flowers is going back with me to my offices to help me improve the formula for that new antitoxin." He waved his hand, and the car moved off. I watched it as it sped across the desert, and a growing suspicion began to form in my mind. Then, like a knife thrust, the truth struck me. "Ezra!" I yelled, swinging the car. "That wasn't Grannie! That was one of those damned cockatoo images. We've got to catch him." The other car was some distance ahead now. Park looked back and saw us following. He did something to the kite wire, and his car leaped ahead. I threw the speed indicator hard over. Our kite was a huge box affair with a steady powerful pull to the connecting wire. Park's vehicle was drawn by a flat triangular kite that dove and fluttered with each variance of the wind. Steadily we began to close in. The manager of Interstellar Voice turned again, and something glinted in his hand. There was a flash of purple flame, and a round hole appeared in our windscreen inches above Karn's head. "Heat gun!" Ezra yelled. Now we were rocketing over the sand dunes, winding in and out between the flagpole trees. I had to catch that car I told myself. Grannie Annie's very life might be at stake, not to mention the lives of hundreds of mine workers. Again Park took aim and again a hole shattered our windscreen. The wind shifted and blew from another quarter. The box kite soared, but the triangular kite faltered. Taking advantage of Park's loss of speed, I raced alongside. The I. V. manager lifted his weapon frantically. But before he could use it a third time, Ezra Karn had whipped a lariat from his belt and sent it coiling across the intervening space. The thong yanked tight about the manager's throat. Park did the only thing he could do. He shut off power, and the two cars coasted to a halt. Then I was across in the other seat, wrenching the weapon free from his grasp. "What have you done with Miss Flowers?" I demanded. The manager's eyes glittered with fear as he saw my finger tense on the trigger. Weakly he lifted an arm and pointed to the northwest. "Val-ley. Thir-ty miles. Entrance hidden by wall of ... flagpole trees." I leaped into the driver's seat and gave the kite its head. And now the country began to undergo a subtle change. The trees seemed to group themselves in a long flanking corridor in a northwesterly direction, as if to hide some secret that lay beyond. Twice I attempted to penetrate that wall, only to find my way blocked by those curious growths. Then a corridor opened before me; a mile forward and the desert began again. But it was a new desert this time: the sand packed hard as granite, the way ahead utterly devoid of vegetation. In the distance black bulging hills extended to right and left, with a narrow chasm or doorway between. I headed for that entrance, and when I reached it, I shut off power with an exclamation of astonishment. There was a huge chair-shaped rock there, and seated upon it was Grannie Annie. She had a tablet in her hands, and she was writing. "Grannie!" I yelled. "What're you doing here? Where's Mr. Baker?" She rose to her feet and clambered down the rock. "Getting back Jimmy's mine laborers," she said, a twinkle in her eyes. "I see you've got Antlers Park. I'm glad of that. It saves me a lot of trouble." She took off her spectacles and wiped them on her sleeve. "Don't look so fuddled, Billy-boy. Come along, and I'll show you." She led the way through the narrow passage into the valley. A deep gorge, it was, with the black sheer cliffs on either side pressing close. Ten feet forward, I stopped short, staring in amazement. Advancing toward me like a column of infantry came a long line of Larynx miners. They walked slowly, looking straight ahead, moving down the center of the gorge toward the entrance. But there was more! A kite car was drawn up to the side. The windscreen had been removed, and mounted on the hood was a large bullet-like contrivance that looked not unlike a search lamp. A blinding shaft of bluish radiance spewed from its open end. Playing it back and forth upon the marching men were Jimmy Baker and Xartal, the Martian. "Ultra violet," Grannie Annie explained. "The opposite end of the vibratory scale and the only thing that will combat the infra-red rays that cause red spot fever. Those men won't stop walking until they've reached Shaft Four." Grannie Annie told her story during the long ride back to Shaft Four. We drove slowly, keeping the line of marching Larynx miners always ahead of us. Jimmy Baker had struck a new big lode of Acoustix, a lode which if worked successfully would see Larynx Incorporated become a far more powerful exporting concern than Interstellar Voice . Antlers Park didn't want that. It was he or his agents who placed those lens buttons in the Larynx barracks. For he knew that just as Jupiter's great spot was responsible for a climate and atmosphere suitable for an Earthman on this Eighth Moon, so also was that spot a deadly power in itself, capable when its rays were concentrated of causing a fatal sickness. Then suddenly becoming fearful of Grannie's prying, Antlers Park strove to head her off before she reached Shaft Four. He did head her off and managed to lure her and Baker and Xartal into the Shaft barracks where they would be exposed to the rays from the lens button. But Grannie only pretended to contract the plague. Park then attempted to outwit Ezra Karn and me by returning in Jimmy Baker's kite car with a cockatoo image of Grannie. I listened to all this in silence. "But," I said when she had finished, "how did Park manage to have that image created and why did the mine laborers walk out into the Baldric when they contracted the fever?" Grannie Annie frowned. "I'm not sure I can answer the first of those questions," she replied. "You must remember Antlers Park has been on this moon five years and during that time he must have acquainted himself with many of its secrets. Probably he learned long ago just what to do to make a cockatoo create a mental image. "As for the men going out into the Baldric, that was more of Park's diabolical work. In the walls of the barracks besides those lens buttons were also miniature electro-hypnotic plates, with the master controlling unit located in that valley. Park knew that when the miners were in a drugged condition from the effects of the fever they would be susceptible to the machine's lure.... And now, Billy-boy, are you coming with me?" "Coming with you?" I repeated. "Where?" The old lady lit a cigarette. "Pluto maybe," she said. "There's a penal colony there, you know, and that ought to tie in nicely with a new crime story. I can see it now ... prison break, stolen rocket ship, fugitives lurking in the interplanetary lanes...." "Grannie," I laughed. "You're incorrigible!"

What was the relationship like between Jimmy and Grannie?

8

Jimmy Baker is the congenial manager of Larynx Incorporated, and Billy immediately likes him. When Jimmy picks up Grannie Annie and her team in the Baldric, he mentions how relieved he feels to have her there to help him with his labor problems. Jimmy is a realist, and Grannie Annie is a science fiction writer, so his pragmatic thinking and her creativity work well together to put a stop to Antlers Park's plot to sabotage Jimmy's business. Because of her stubborn insistence of carefully observing each setting for her potential novels, Grannie Annie has developed a quick and keen understanding of unusual phenomena she discovers in her travels. This helps her determine the cause of the 3D duplicates of themselves the cockatoos create and also helps her to quickly deduce Antlers' scheme. When Antlers attempts to force the Red-Spot Fever upon Annie, Jimmy, and Xartal, Annie's creativity leads her to pretend to contract the plague, so that Antlers will leave them to enact the rest of his plot. With Antlers gone, Jimmy and Annie work together to develop the plan to remove the windscreen from his kite car and replace it with an ultra-violet radiator that could be used to guide his lost workers back to Larynx Incorporated.

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Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net DOUBLE TROUBLE by CARL JACOBI Grannie Annie, that waspish science-fiction writer, was in a jam again. What with red-spot fever, talking cockatoos and flagpole trees, I was running in circles—especially since Grannie became twins every now and then. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] We had left the offices of Interstellar Voice three days ago, Earth time, and now as the immense disc of Jupiter flamed across the sky, entered the outer limits of the Baldric. Grannie Annie strode in the lead, her absurd long-skirted black dress looking as out of place in this desert as the trees. Flagpole trees. They rose straight up like enormous cat-tails, with only a melon-shaped protuberance at the top to show they were a form of vegetation. Everything else was blanketed by the sand and the powerful wind that blew from all quarters. As we reached the first of those trees, Grannie came to a halt. "This is the Baldric all right. If my calculations are right, we've hit it at its narrowest spot." Ezra Karn took a greasy pipe from his lips and spat. "It looks like the rest of this God-forsaken moon," he said, "'ceptin for them sticks." Xartal, the Martian illustrator, said nothing. He was like that, taciturn, speaking only when spoken to. He could be excused this time, however, for this was only our third day on Jupiter's Eighth Moon, and the country was still strange to us. When Annabella C. Flowers, that renowned writer of science fiction, visiphoned me at Crater City, Mars, to meet her here, I had thought she was crazy. But Miss Flowers, known to her friends as Grannie Annie, had always been mildly crazy. If you haven't read her books, you've missed something. She's the author of Lady of the Green Flames , Lady of the Runaway Planet , Lady of the Crimson Space-Beast , and other works of science fiction. Blood-and-thunder as these books are, however, they have one redeeming feature—authenticity of background. Grannie Annie was the original research digger-upper, and when she laid the setting of a yarn on a star of the sixth magnitude, only a transportation-velocity of less than light could prevent her from visiting her "stage" in person. Therefore when she asked me to meet her at the landing field of Interstellar Voice on Jupiter's Eighth Moon, I knew she had another novel in the state of embryo. What I didn't expect was Ezra Karn. He was an old prospector Grannie had met, and he had become so attached to the authoress he now followed her wherever she went. As for Xartal, he was a Martian and was slated to do the illustrations for Grannie's new book. Five minutes after my ship had blasted down, the four of us met in the offices of Interstellar Voice . And then I was shaking hands with Antlers Park, the manager of I. V. himself. "Glad to meet you," he said cordially. "I've just been trying to persuade Miss Flowers not to attempt a trip into the Baldric." "What's the Baldric?" I had asked. Antlers Park flicked the ash from his cheroot and shrugged. "Will you believe me, sir," he said, "when I tell you I've been out here on this forsaken moon five years and don't rightly know myself?" I scowled at that; it didn't make sense. "However, as you perhaps know, the only reason for colonial activities here at all is because of the presence of an ore known as Acoustix. It's no use to the people of Earth but of untold value on Mars. I'm not up on the scientific reasons, but it seems that life on the red planet has developed with a supersonic method of vocal communication. The Martian speaks as the Earthman does, but he amplifies his thoughts' transmission by way of wave lengths as high as three million vibrations per second. The trouble is that by the time the average Martian reaches middle age, his ability to produce those vibrations steadily decreases. Then it was found that this ore, Acoustix, revitalized their sounding apparatus, and the rush was on." "What do you mean?" Park leaned back. "The rush to find more of the ore," he explained. "But up until now this moon is the only place where it can be found. "There are two companies here," he continued, " Interstellar Voice and Larynx Incorporated . Chap by the name of Jimmy Baker runs that. However, the point is, between the properties of these two companies stretches a band or belt which has become known as the Baldric. "There are two principal forms of life in the Baldric; flagpole trees and a species of ornithoid resembling cockatoos. So far no one has crossed the Baldric without trouble." "What sort of trouble?" Grannie Annie had demanded. And when Antlers Park stuttered evasively, the old lady snorted, "Fiddlesticks, I never saw trouble yet that couldn't be explained. We leave in an hour." So now here we were at the outer reaches of the Baldric, four travelers on foot with only the barest necessities in the way of equipment and supplies. I walked forward to get a closer view of one of the flagpole trees. And then abruptly I saw something else. A queer-looking bird squatted there in the sand, looking up at me. Silver in plumage, it resembled a parrot with a crest; and yet it didn't. In some strange way the thing was a hideous caricature. "Look what I found," I yelled. "What I found," said the cockatoo in a very human voice. "Thunder, it talks," I said amazed. "Talks," repeated the bird, blinking its eyes. The cockatoo repeated my last statement again, then rose on its short legs, flapped its wings once and soared off into the sky. Xartal, the Martian illustrator, already had a notebook in his hands and was sketching a likeness of the creature. Ten minutes later we were on the move again. We saw more silver cockatoos and more flagpole trees. Above us, the great disc of Jupiter began to descend toward the horizon. And then all at once Grannie stopped again, this time at the top of a high ridge. She shielded her eyes and stared off into the plain we had just crossed. "Billy-boy," she said to me in a strange voice, "look down there and tell me what you see." I followed the direction of her hand and a shock went through me from head to foot. Down there, slowly toiling across the sand, advanced a party of four persons. In the lead was a little old lady in a black dress. Behind her strode a grizzled Earth man in a flop-brimmed hat, another Earth man, and a Martian. Detail for detail they were a duplicate of ourselves! "A mirage!" said Ezra Karn. But it wasn't a mirage. As the party came closer, we could see that their lips were moving, and their voices became audible. I listened in awe. The duplicate of myself was talking to the duplicate of Grannie Annie, and she was replying in the most natural way. Steadily the four travelers approached. Then, when a dozen yards away, they suddenly faded like a negative exposed to light and disappeared. "What do you make of it?" I said in a hushed voice. Grannie shook her head. "Might be a form of mass hypnosis superinduced by some chemical radiations," she replied. "Whatever it is, we'd better watch our step. There's no telling what might lie ahead." We walked after that with taut nerves and watchful eyes, but we saw no repetition of the "mirage." The wind continued to blow ceaselessly, and the sand seemed to grow more and more powdery. For some time I had fixed my gaze on a dot in the sky which I supposed to be a high-flying cockatoo. As that dot continued to move across the heavens in a single direction, I called Grannie's attention to it. "It's a kite," she nodded. "There should be a car attached to it somewhere." She offered no further explanation, but a quarter of an hour later as we topped another rise a curious elliptical car with a long slanting windscreen came into view. Attached to its hood was a taut wire which slanted up into the sky to connect with the kite. A man was driving and when he saw us, he waved. Five minutes later Grannie was shaking his hand vigorously and mumbling introductions. "This is Jimmy Baker," she said. "He manages Larynx Incorporated , and he's the real reason we're here." I decided I liked Baker the moment I saw him. In his middle thirties, he was tall and lean, with pleasant blue eyes which even his sand goggles could not conceal. "I can't tell you how glad I am you're here, Grannie," he said. "If anybody can help me, you can." Grannie's eyes glittered. "Trouble with the mine laborers?" she questioned. Jimmy Baker nodded. He told his story over the roar of the wind as we headed back across the desert. Occasionally he touched a stud on an electric windlass to which the kite wire was attached. Apparently these adjustments moved planes or fins on the kite and accounted for the car's ability to move in any direction. "If I weren't a realist, I'd say that Larynx Incorporated has been bewitched," he began slowly. "We pay our men high wages and give them excellent living conditions with a vacation on Callisto every year. Up until a short time ago most of them were in excellent health and spirits. Then the Red Spot Fever got them." "Red Spot Fever?" Grannie looked at him curiously. Jimmy Baker nodded. "The first symptoms are a tendency to garrulousness on the part of the patient. Then they disappear." He paused to make an adjustment of the windlass. "They walk out into the Baldric," he continued, "and nothing can stop them. We tried following them, of course, but it was no go. As soon as they realize they're being followed, they stop. But the moment our eyes are turned, they give us the slip." "But surely you must have some idea of where they go," Grannie said. Baker lit a cigarette. "There's all kinds of rumors," he replied, "but none of them will hold water. By the way, there's a cockatoo eyrie ahead of us." I followed his gaze and saw a curious structure suspended between a rude circle of flagpole trees. A strange web-like formation of translucent gauzy material, it was. Fully two hundred cockatoos were perched upon it. They watched us with their mild eyes as we passed, but they didn't move. After that we were rolling up the driveway that led to the offices of Larynx Incorporated . As Jimmy Baker led the way up the inclined ramp, a door in the central building opened, and a man emerged. His face was drawn. "Mr. Baker," he said breathlessly, "seventy-five workers at Shaft Four have headed out into the Baldric." Baker dropped his cigarette and ground his heel on it savagely. "Shaft Four, eh?" he repeated. "That's our principal mine. If the fever spreads there, I'm licked." He motioned us into his office and strode across to a desk. Silent Xartal, the Martian illustrator, took a chair in a corner and got his notebook out, sketching the room's interior. Grannie Annie remained standing. Presently the old lady walked across to the desk and helped herself to the bottle of Martian whiskey there. "There must be ways of stopping this," she said. "Have you called in any physicians? Why don't you call an enforced vacation and send the men away until the plague has died down?" Baker shook his head. "Three doctors from Callisto were here last month. They were as much at loss as I am. As for sending the men away, I may have to do that, but when I do, it means quits. Our company is chartered with Spacolonial, and you know what that means. Failure to produce during a period of thirty days or more, and you lose all rights." A visiphone bell sounded, and Baker walked across to the instrument. A man's face formed in the vision plate. Baker listened, said "Okay" and threw off the switch. "The entire crew of Shaft Four have gone out into the Baldric," he said slowly. There was a large map hanging on the wall back of Baker's desk. Grannie Annie walked across to it and began to study its markings. "Shaft Four is at the outer edge of the Baldric at a point where that corridor is at its widest," she said. Baker looked up. "That's right. We only began operations there a comparatively short time ago. Struck a rich vein of Acoustix that runs deep in. If that vein holds out, we'll double the output of Interstellar Voice , our rival, in a year." Grannie nodded. "I think you and I and Xartal had better take a run up there," she said. "But first I want to see your laboratory." There was no refusing her. Jimmy Baker led the way down to a lower level where a huge laboratory and experimental shop ran the length of the building. Grannie seized a light weight carry-case and began dropping articles into it. A pontocated glass lens, three or four Wellington radite bulbs, each with a spectroscopic filament, a small dynamo that would operate on a kite windlass, and a quantity of wire and other items. The kite car was brought out again, and the old woman, Baker and the Martian took their places in it. Then Jimmy waved, and the car began to roll down the ramp. Not until they had vanished in the desert haze did I sense the loneliness of this outpost. With that loneliness came a sudden sense of foreboding. Had I been a fool to let Grannie go? I thought of her, an old woman who should be in a rocking chair, knitting socks. If anything happened to Annabella C. Flowers, I would never forgive myself and neither would her millions of readers. Ezra Karn and I went back into the office. The old prospector chuckled. "Dang human dynamo. Got more energy than a runaway comet." A connecting door on the far side of the office opened onto a long corridor which ended at a staircase. "Let's look around," I said. We passed down the corridor and climbed the staircase to the second floor. Here were the general offices of Larynx Incorporated , and through glass doors I could see clerks busy with counting machines and report tapes. In another chamber the extremely light Acoustix ore was being packed into big cases and marked for shipment. At the far end a door to a small room stood open. Inside a young man was tilted back in a swivel chair before a complicated instrument panel. "C'mon in," he said, seeing us. "If you want a look at your friends, here they are." He flicked a stud, and the entire wall above the panel underwent a slow change of colors. Those colors whirled kaleidescopically, then coalesced into a three-dimensional scene. It was a scene of a rapidly unfolding desert country as seen from the rear of a kite car. Directly behind the windscreen, backs turned to me, were Jimmy Baker, Grannie, and Xartal. It was as if I were standing directly behind them. "It's Mr. Baker's own invention," the operator said. "An improvement on the visiphone." "Do you mean to say you can follow the movements of that car and its passengers wherever it goes? Can you hear them talk too?" "Sure." The operator turned another dial, and Grannie's falsetto voice entered the room. It stopped abruptly. "The machine uses a lot of power," the operator said, "and as yet we haven't got much." The cloud of anxiety which had wrapped itself about me disappeared somewhat as I viewed this device. At least I could now keep myself posted of Grannie's movements. Karn and I went down to the commissary where we ate our supper. When we returned to Jimmy Baker's office, the visiphone bell was ringing. I went over to it and turned it on, and to my surprise the face of Antlers Park flashed on the screen. "Hello," he said in his friendly way. "I see you arrived all right. Is Miss Flowers there?" "Miss Flowers left with Mr. Baker for Shaft Four," I said. "There's trouble up there. Red spot fever." "Fever, eh?" repeated Park. "That's a shame. Is there anything I can do?" "Tell me," I said, "has your company had any trouble with this plague?" "A little. But up until yesterday the fever's been confined to the other side of the Baldric. We had one partial case, but my chemists gave the chap an antitoxin that seems to have worked. Come to think of it, I might drive over to Shaft Four and give Jimmy Baker the formula. I haven't been out in the Baldric for years, but if you didn't have any trouble, I shouldn't either." We exchanged a few more pleasantries, and then he rang off. In exactly an hour I went upstairs to the visiscreen room. Then once more I was directly behind my friends, listening in on their conversation. The view through the windscreen showed an irregular array of flagpole trees, with the sky dotted by high-flying cockatoos. "There's an eyrie over there," Jimmy Baker was saying. "We might as well camp beside it." Moments later a rude circle of flagpole trees loomed ahead. Across the top of them was stretched a translucent web. Jimmy and Grannie got out of the car and began making camp. Xartal remained in his seat. He was drawing pictures on large pieces of pasteboard, and as I stood there in the visiscreen room, I watched him. There was no doubt about it, the Martian was clever. He would make a few rapid lines on one of the pasteboards, rub it a little to get the proper shading and then go on to the next. In swift rotation likenesses of Ezra Karn, of myself, of Jimmy Baker, and of Antlers Park took form. Ezra spoke over my shoulder. "He's doing scenes for Grannie's new book," he said. "The old lady figures on using the events here for a plot. Look at that damned nosy bird! " A silver cockatoo had alighted on the kite car and was surveying curiously Xartal's work. As each drawing was completed, the bird scanned it with rapt attention. Abruptly it flew to the top of the eyrie, where it seemed to be having a consultation with its bird companions. And then abruptly it happened. The cockatoos took off in mass flight. A group of Earth people suddenly materialized on the eyrie, talking and moving about as if it were the most natural thing in the world. With a shock I saw the likeness of myself; I saw Ezra Karn; and I saw the image of Jimmy Baker. The real Jimmy Baker stood next to Grannie, staring up at this incredible mirage. Grannie let out a whoop. "I've got it!" she said. "Those things we see up there are nothing more than mental images. They're Xartal's drawings!" "Don't you see," the lady continued. "Everything that Xartal put on paper has been seen by one or more of these cockatoos. The cockatoos are like Earth parrots all right, but not only have they the power of copying speech, they also have the ability to recreate a mental image of what they have seen. In other words their brains form a powerful photographic impression of the object. That impression is then transmitted simultaneously in telepathic wavelengths to common foci. That eyrie might be likened to a cinema screen, receiving brain vibrations from a hundred different sources that blend into the light field to form what are apparently three-dimensional images." The Larynx manager nodded slowly. "I see," he said. "But why don't the birds reconstruct images from the actual person. Why use drawings?" "Probably because the drawings are exaggerated in certain details and made a greater impression on their brains," Grannie replied. Up on the eyrie a strange performance was taking place. The duplicate of Grannie Annie was bowing to the duplicate of Jimmy Baker, and the image of Ezra Karn was playing leap frog with the image of Antlers Park. Then abruptly the screen before me blurred and went blank. "Sorry," the operator said. "I've used too much power already. Have to give the generators a chance to build it up again." Nodding, I turned and motioned to Karn. We went back downstairs. "That explains something at any rate," the old prospector said. "But how about that Red spot fever?" On Jimmy Baker's desk was a large file marked: FEVER VICTIMS. I opened it and found it contained the case histories of those men who had been attacked by the strange malady. Reading them over, I was struck by one detail. Each patient had received the first symptoms, not while working in the mines, but while sleeping or lounging in the barracks. Five minutes later Karn and I were striding down a white ramp that led to the nearest barracks. The building came into sight, a low rectangular structure, dome-roofed to withstand the violent winds. Inside double tiers of bunks stretched along either wall. In those bunks some thirty men lay sleeping. The far wall was taken up by a huge window of denvo-quartz. As I stood there, something suddenly caught Ezra Karn's eye. He began to walk toward that window. "Look here," he said. Six feet up on that window a small almost imperceptible button of dull metal had been wedged into an aperture cut in the quartz. The central part of the button appeared to be a powerful lens of some kind, and as I seized it and pulled it loose, I felt the hum of tiny clock work. All at once I had it! Red spot fever. Heat fever from the infra-red rays of Jupiter's great spot. Someone had constructed this lens to concentrate and amplify the power of those rays. The internal clockwork served a double purpose. It opened a shutter, and it rotated the lens slowly so that it played for a time on each of the sleeping men. I slid the metal button in my pocket and left the barracks at a run. Back in the visiscreen room, I snapped to the operator: "Turn it on!" The kite car swam into view in the screen above the instrument panel. I stared with open eyes. Jimmy Baker no longer was in the car, nor was Xartal, the Martian. Grannie Annie was there, but seated at the controls was Antlers Park, the manager of Interstellar Voice. Ezra Karn jabbed my elbow. "Grannie's coming back. I thought she'd be getting sick of this blamed moon." It didn't make sense. In all the years I'd known Annabella C. Flowers, never yet had I seen her desert a case until she had woven the clues and facts to a logical conclusion. "Ezra," I said, "we're going to drive out and meet them. There's something screwy here." Ten minutes later in another kite car we were driving at a fast clip through the powdery sands of the Baldric. And before long we saw another car approaching. It was Grannie. As the car drew up alongside I saw her sitting in her prim way next to Antlers Park. Park said: "We left the others at the mine. Miss Flowers is going back with me to my offices to help me improve the formula for that new antitoxin." He waved his hand, and the car moved off. I watched it as it sped across the desert, and a growing suspicion began to form in my mind. Then, like a knife thrust, the truth struck me. "Ezra!" I yelled, swinging the car. "That wasn't Grannie! That was one of those damned cockatoo images. We've got to catch him." The other car was some distance ahead now. Park looked back and saw us following. He did something to the kite wire, and his car leaped ahead. I threw the speed indicator hard over. Our kite was a huge box affair with a steady powerful pull to the connecting wire. Park's vehicle was drawn by a flat triangular kite that dove and fluttered with each variance of the wind. Steadily we began to close in. The manager of Interstellar Voice turned again, and something glinted in his hand. There was a flash of purple flame, and a round hole appeared in our windscreen inches above Karn's head. "Heat gun!" Ezra yelled. Now we were rocketing over the sand dunes, winding in and out between the flagpole trees. I had to catch that car I told myself. Grannie Annie's very life might be at stake, not to mention the lives of hundreds of mine workers. Again Park took aim and again a hole shattered our windscreen. The wind shifted and blew from another quarter. The box kite soared, but the triangular kite faltered. Taking advantage of Park's loss of speed, I raced alongside. The I. V. manager lifted his weapon frantically. But before he could use it a third time, Ezra Karn had whipped a lariat from his belt and sent it coiling across the intervening space. The thong yanked tight about the manager's throat. Park did the only thing he could do. He shut off power, and the two cars coasted to a halt. Then I was across in the other seat, wrenching the weapon free from his grasp. "What have you done with Miss Flowers?" I demanded. The manager's eyes glittered with fear as he saw my finger tense on the trigger. Weakly he lifted an arm and pointed to the northwest. "Val-ley. Thir-ty miles. Entrance hidden by wall of ... flagpole trees." I leaped into the driver's seat and gave the kite its head. And now the country began to undergo a subtle change. The trees seemed to group themselves in a long flanking corridor in a northwesterly direction, as if to hide some secret that lay beyond. Twice I attempted to penetrate that wall, only to find my way blocked by those curious growths. Then a corridor opened before me; a mile forward and the desert began again. But it was a new desert this time: the sand packed hard as granite, the way ahead utterly devoid of vegetation. In the distance black bulging hills extended to right and left, with a narrow chasm or doorway between. I headed for that entrance, and when I reached it, I shut off power with an exclamation of astonishment. There was a huge chair-shaped rock there, and seated upon it was Grannie Annie. She had a tablet in her hands, and she was writing. "Grannie!" I yelled. "What're you doing here? Where's Mr. Baker?" She rose to her feet and clambered down the rock. "Getting back Jimmy's mine laborers," she said, a twinkle in her eyes. "I see you've got Antlers Park. I'm glad of that. It saves me a lot of trouble." She took off her spectacles and wiped them on her sleeve. "Don't look so fuddled, Billy-boy. Come along, and I'll show you." She led the way through the narrow passage into the valley. A deep gorge, it was, with the black sheer cliffs on either side pressing close. Ten feet forward, I stopped short, staring in amazement. Advancing toward me like a column of infantry came a long line of Larynx miners. They walked slowly, looking straight ahead, moving down the center of the gorge toward the entrance. But there was more! A kite car was drawn up to the side. The windscreen had been removed, and mounted on the hood was a large bullet-like contrivance that looked not unlike a search lamp. A blinding shaft of bluish radiance spewed from its open end. Playing it back and forth upon the marching men were Jimmy Baker and Xartal, the Martian. "Ultra violet," Grannie Annie explained. "The opposite end of the vibratory scale and the only thing that will combat the infra-red rays that cause red spot fever. Those men won't stop walking until they've reached Shaft Four." Grannie Annie told her story during the long ride back to Shaft Four. We drove slowly, keeping the line of marching Larynx miners always ahead of us. Jimmy Baker had struck a new big lode of Acoustix, a lode which if worked successfully would see Larynx Incorporated become a far more powerful exporting concern than Interstellar Voice . Antlers Park didn't want that. It was he or his agents who placed those lens buttons in the Larynx barracks. For he knew that just as Jupiter's great spot was responsible for a climate and atmosphere suitable for an Earthman on this Eighth Moon, so also was that spot a deadly power in itself, capable when its rays were concentrated of causing a fatal sickness. Then suddenly becoming fearful of Grannie's prying, Antlers Park strove to head her off before she reached Shaft Four. He did head her off and managed to lure her and Baker and Xartal into the Shaft barracks where they would be exposed to the rays from the lens button. But Grannie only pretended to contract the plague. Park then attempted to outwit Ezra Karn and me by returning in Jimmy Baker's kite car with a cockatoo image of Grannie. I listened to all this in silence. "But," I said when she had finished, "how did Park manage to have that image created and why did the mine laborers walk out into the Baldric when they contracted the fever?" Grannie Annie frowned. "I'm not sure I can answer the first of those questions," she replied. "You must remember Antlers Park has been on this moon five years and during that time he must have acquainted himself with many of its secrets. Probably he learned long ago just what to do to make a cockatoo create a mental image. "As for the men going out into the Baldric, that was more of Park's diabolical work. In the walls of the barracks besides those lens buttons were also miniature electro-hypnotic plates, with the master controlling unit located in that valley. Park knew that when the miners were in a drugged condition from the effects of the fever they would be susceptible to the machine's lure.... And now, Billy-boy, are you coming with me?" "Coming with you?" I repeated. "Where?" The old lady lit a cigarette. "Pluto maybe," she said. "There's a penal colony there, you know, and that ought to tie in nicely with a new crime story. I can see it now ... prison break, stolen rocket ship, fugitives lurking in the interplanetary lanes...." "Grannie," I laughed. "You're incorrigible!"

What was the relationship like between Jimmy and Grannie?

1

Jimmy is thankful that Grannie Annie and her friends have come to help him solve the mystery of the Red Spot Fever. His business, Larynx Incorporated, will no longer exist if they can’t find the route cause of the illness. Jimmy needs his workers to stay on task and mine the ore, Acoustix, so that he can sell his product. Without the miners, Interstellar Voice will undoubtedly win the race and Larynx Incorporated will become obsolete. Jimmy explains that he pays his workers well and sends them on a nice vacation every year, so he can’t figure out why they are all walking off the job. Although Antlers Park tries to scare Grannie Annie away from going to the Baldric to help her friend, Grannie Annie isn’t buying what he’s selling. She’s there to research her new novel and help out Jimmy, and nothing is going to stop her from completing her task. It is Grannie Annie’s idea to set up the ultraviolet screen that will counteract the infrared-rays that cause Red Spot Fever, and she does it all to get Jimmy’s workers back to the mines.

63442

Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net DOUBLE TROUBLE by CARL JACOBI Grannie Annie, that waspish science-fiction writer, was in a jam again. What with red-spot fever, talking cockatoos and flagpole trees, I was running in circles—especially since Grannie became twins every now and then. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] We had left the offices of Interstellar Voice three days ago, Earth time, and now as the immense disc of Jupiter flamed across the sky, entered the outer limits of the Baldric. Grannie Annie strode in the lead, her absurd long-skirted black dress looking as out of place in this desert as the trees. Flagpole trees. They rose straight up like enormous cat-tails, with only a melon-shaped protuberance at the top to show they were a form of vegetation. Everything else was blanketed by the sand and the powerful wind that blew from all quarters. As we reached the first of those trees, Grannie came to a halt. "This is the Baldric all right. If my calculations are right, we've hit it at its narrowest spot." Ezra Karn took a greasy pipe from his lips and spat. "It looks like the rest of this God-forsaken moon," he said, "'ceptin for them sticks." Xartal, the Martian illustrator, said nothing. He was like that, taciturn, speaking only when spoken to. He could be excused this time, however, for this was only our third day on Jupiter's Eighth Moon, and the country was still strange to us. When Annabella C. Flowers, that renowned writer of science fiction, visiphoned me at Crater City, Mars, to meet her here, I had thought she was crazy. But Miss Flowers, known to her friends as Grannie Annie, had always been mildly crazy. If you haven't read her books, you've missed something. She's the author of Lady of the Green Flames , Lady of the Runaway Planet , Lady of the Crimson Space-Beast , and other works of science fiction. Blood-and-thunder as these books are, however, they have one redeeming feature—authenticity of background. Grannie Annie was the original research digger-upper, and when she laid the setting of a yarn on a star of the sixth magnitude, only a transportation-velocity of less than light could prevent her from visiting her "stage" in person. Therefore when she asked me to meet her at the landing field of Interstellar Voice on Jupiter's Eighth Moon, I knew she had another novel in the state of embryo. What I didn't expect was Ezra Karn. He was an old prospector Grannie had met, and he had become so attached to the authoress he now followed her wherever she went. As for Xartal, he was a Martian and was slated to do the illustrations for Grannie's new book. Five minutes after my ship had blasted down, the four of us met in the offices of Interstellar Voice . And then I was shaking hands with Antlers Park, the manager of I. V. himself. "Glad to meet you," he said cordially. "I've just been trying to persuade Miss Flowers not to attempt a trip into the Baldric." "What's the Baldric?" I had asked. Antlers Park flicked the ash from his cheroot and shrugged. "Will you believe me, sir," he said, "when I tell you I've been out here on this forsaken moon five years and don't rightly know myself?" I scowled at that; it didn't make sense. "However, as you perhaps know, the only reason for colonial activities here at all is because of the presence of an ore known as Acoustix. It's no use to the people of Earth but of untold value on Mars. I'm not up on the scientific reasons, but it seems that life on the red planet has developed with a supersonic method of vocal communication. The Martian speaks as the Earthman does, but he amplifies his thoughts' transmission by way of wave lengths as high as three million vibrations per second. The trouble is that by the time the average Martian reaches middle age, his ability to produce those vibrations steadily decreases. Then it was found that this ore, Acoustix, revitalized their sounding apparatus, and the rush was on." "What do you mean?" Park leaned back. "The rush to find more of the ore," he explained. "But up until now this moon is the only place where it can be found. "There are two companies here," he continued, " Interstellar Voice and Larynx Incorporated . Chap by the name of Jimmy Baker runs that. However, the point is, between the properties of these two companies stretches a band or belt which has become known as the Baldric. "There are two principal forms of life in the Baldric; flagpole trees and a species of ornithoid resembling cockatoos. So far no one has crossed the Baldric without trouble." "What sort of trouble?" Grannie Annie had demanded. And when Antlers Park stuttered evasively, the old lady snorted, "Fiddlesticks, I never saw trouble yet that couldn't be explained. We leave in an hour." So now here we were at the outer reaches of the Baldric, four travelers on foot with only the barest necessities in the way of equipment and supplies. I walked forward to get a closer view of one of the flagpole trees. And then abruptly I saw something else. A queer-looking bird squatted there in the sand, looking up at me. Silver in plumage, it resembled a parrot with a crest; and yet it didn't. In some strange way the thing was a hideous caricature. "Look what I found," I yelled. "What I found," said the cockatoo in a very human voice. "Thunder, it talks," I said amazed. "Talks," repeated the bird, blinking its eyes. The cockatoo repeated my last statement again, then rose on its short legs, flapped its wings once and soared off into the sky. Xartal, the Martian illustrator, already had a notebook in his hands and was sketching a likeness of the creature. Ten minutes later we were on the move again. We saw more silver cockatoos and more flagpole trees. Above us, the great disc of Jupiter began to descend toward the horizon. And then all at once Grannie stopped again, this time at the top of a high ridge. She shielded her eyes and stared off into the plain we had just crossed. "Billy-boy," she said to me in a strange voice, "look down there and tell me what you see." I followed the direction of her hand and a shock went through me from head to foot. Down there, slowly toiling across the sand, advanced a party of four persons. In the lead was a little old lady in a black dress. Behind her strode a grizzled Earth man in a flop-brimmed hat, another Earth man, and a Martian. Detail for detail they were a duplicate of ourselves! "A mirage!" said Ezra Karn. But it wasn't a mirage. As the party came closer, we could see that their lips were moving, and their voices became audible. I listened in awe. The duplicate of myself was talking to the duplicate of Grannie Annie, and she was replying in the most natural way. Steadily the four travelers approached. Then, when a dozen yards away, they suddenly faded like a negative exposed to light and disappeared. "What do you make of it?" I said in a hushed voice. Grannie shook her head. "Might be a form of mass hypnosis superinduced by some chemical radiations," she replied. "Whatever it is, we'd better watch our step. There's no telling what might lie ahead." We walked after that with taut nerves and watchful eyes, but we saw no repetition of the "mirage." The wind continued to blow ceaselessly, and the sand seemed to grow more and more powdery. For some time I had fixed my gaze on a dot in the sky which I supposed to be a high-flying cockatoo. As that dot continued to move across the heavens in a single direction, I called Grannie's attention to it. "It's a kite," she nodded. "There should be a car attached to it somewhere." She offered no further explanation, but a quarter of an hour later as we topped another rise a curious elliptical car with a long slanting windscreen came into view. Attached to its hood was a taut wire which slanted up into the sky to connect with the kite. A man was driving and when he saw us, he waved. Five minutes later Grannie was shaking his hand vigorously and mumbling introductions. "This is Jimmy Baker," she said. "He manages Larynx Incorporated , and he's the real reason we're here." I decided I liked Baker the moment I saw him. In his middle thirties, he was tall and lean, with pleasant blue eyes which even his sand goggles could not conceal. "I can't tell you how glad I am you're here, Grannie," he said. "If anybody can help me, you can." Grannie's eyes glittered. "Trouble with the mine laborers?" she questioned. Jimmy Baker nodded. He told his story over the roar of the wind as we headed back across the desert. Occasionally he touched a stud on an electric windlass to which the kite wire was attached. Apparently these adjustments moved planes or fins on the kite and accounted for the car's ability to move in any direction. "If I weren't a realist, I'd say that Larynx Incorporated has been bewitched," he began slowly. "We pay our men high wages and give them excellent living conditions with a vacation on Callisto every year. Up until a short time ago most of them were in excellent health and spirits. Then the Red Spot Fever got them." "Red Spot Fever?" Grannie looked at him curiously. Jimmy Baker nodded. "The first symptoms are a tendency to garrulousness on the part of the patient. Then they disappear." He paused to make an adjustment of the windlass. "They walk out into the Baldric," he continued, "and nothing can stop them. We tried following them, of course, but it was no go. As soon as they realize they're being followed, they stop. But the moment our eyes are turned, they give us the slip." "But surely you must have some idea of where they go," Grannie said. Baker lit a cigarette. "There's all kinds of rumors," he replied, "but none of them will hold water. By the way, there's a cockatoo eyrie ahead of us." I followed his gaze and saw a curious structure suspended between a rude circle of flagpole trees. A strange web-like formation of translucent gauzy material, it was. Fully two hundred cockatoos were perched upon it. They watched us with their mild eyes as we passed, but they didn't move. After that we were rolling up the driveway that led to the offices of Larynx Incorporated . As Jimmy Baker led the way up the inclined ramp, a door in the central building opened, and a man emerged. His face was drawn. "Mr. Baker," he said breathlessly, "seventy-five workers at Shaft Four have headed out into the Baldric." Baker dropped his cigarette and ground his heel on it savagely. "Shaft Four, eh?" he repeated. "That's our principal mine. If the fever spreads there, I'm licked." He motioned us into his office and strode across to a desk. Silent Xartal, the Martian illustrator, took a chair in a corner and got his notebook out, sketching the room's interior. Grannie Annie remained standing. Presently the old lady walked across to the desk and helped herself to the bottle of Martian whiskey there. "There must be ways of stopping this," she said. "Have you called in any physicians? Why don't you call an enforced vacation and send the men away until the plague has died down?" Baker shook his head. "Three doctors from Callisto were here last month. They were as much at loss as I am. As for sending the men away, I may have to do that, but when I do, it means quits. Our company is chartered with Spacolonial, and you know what that means. Failure to produce during a period of thirty days or more, and you lose all rights." A visiphone bell sounded, and Baker walked across to the instrument. A man's face formed in the vision plate. Baker listened, said "Okay" and threw off the switch. "The entire crew of Shaft Four have gone out into the Baldric," he said slowly. There was a large map hanging on the wall back of Baker's desk. Grannie Annie walked across to it and began to study its markings. "Shaft Four is at the outer edge of the Baldric at a point where that corridor is at its widest," she said. Baker looked up. "That's right. We only began operations there a comparatively short time ago. Struck a rich vein of Acoustix that runs deep in. If that vein holds out, we'll double the output of Interstellar Voice , our rival, in a year." Grannie nodded. "I think you and I and Xartal had better take a run up there," she said. "But first I want to see your laboratory." There was no refusing her. Jimmy Baker led the way down to a lower level where a huge laboratory and experimental shop ran the length of the building. Grannie seized a light weight carry-case and began dropping articles into it. A pontocated glass lens, three or four Wellington radite bulbs, each with a spectroscopic filament, a small dynamo that would operate on a kite windlass, and a quantity of wire and other items. The kite car was brought out again, and the old woman, Baker and the Martian took their places in it. Then Jimmy waved, and the car began to roll down the ramp. Not until they had vanished in the desert haze did I sense the loneliness of this outpost. With that loneliness came a sudden sense of foreboding. Had I been a fool to let Grannie go? I thought of her, an old woman who should be in a rocking chair, knitting socks. If anything happened to Annabella C. Flowers, I would never forgive myself and neither would her millions of readers. Ezra Karn and I went back into the office. The old prospector chuckled. "Dang human dynamo. Got more energy than a runaway comet." A connecting door on the far side of the office opened onto a long corridor which ended at a staircase. "Let's look around," I said. We passed down the corridor and climbed the staircase to the second floor. Here were the general offices of Larynx Incorporated , and through glass doors I could see clerks busy with counting machines and report tapes. In another chamber the extremely light Acoustix ore was being packed into big cases and marked for shipment. At the far end a door to a small room stood open. Inside a young man was tilted back in a swivel chair before a complicated instrument panel. "C'mon in," he said, seeing us. "If you want a look at your friends, here they are." He flicked a stud, and the entire wall above the panel underwent a slow change of colors. Those colors whirled kaleidescopically, then coalesced into a three-dimensional scene. It was a scene of a rapidly unfolding desert country as seen from the rear of a kite car. Directly behind the windscreen, backs turned to me, were Jimmy Baker, Grannie, and Xartal. It was as if I were standing directly behind them. "It's Mr. Baker's own invention," the operator said. "An improvement on the visiphone." "Do you mean to say you can follow the movements of that car and its passengers wherever it goes? Can you hear them talk too?" "Sure." The operator turned another dial, and Grannie's falsetto voice entered the room. It stopped abruptly. "The machine uses a lot of power," the operator said, "and as yet we haven't got much." The cloud of anxiety which had wrapped itself about me disappeared somewhat as I viewed this device. At least I could now keep myself posted of Grannie's movements. Karn and I went down to the commissary where we ate our supper. When we returned to Jimmy Baker's office, the visiphone bell was ringing. I went over to it and turned it on, and to my surprise the face of Antlers Park flashed on the screen. "Hello," he said in his friendly way. "I see you arrived all right. Is Miss Flowers there?" "Miss Flowers left with Mr. Baker for Shaft Four," I said. "There's trouble up there. Red spot fever." "Fever, eh?" repeated Park. "That's a shame. Is there anything I can do?" "Tell me," I said, "has your company had any trouble with this plague?" "A little. But up until yesterday the fever's been confined to the other side of the Baldric. We had one partial case, but my chemists gave the chap an antitoxin that seems to have worked. Come to think of it, I might drive over to Shaft Four and give Jimmy Baker the formula. I haven't been out in the Baldric for years, but if you didn't have any trouble, I shouldn't either." We exchanged a few more pleasantries, and then he rang off. In exactly an hour I went upstairs to the visiscreen room. Then once more I was directly behind my friends, listening in on their conversation. The view through the windscreen showed an irregular array of flagpole trees, with the sky dotted by high-flying cockatoos. "There's an eyrie over there," Jimmy Baker was saying. "We might as well camp beside it." Moments later a rude circle of flagpole trees loomed ahead. Across the top of them was stretched a translucent web. Jimmy and Grannie got out of the car and began making camp. Xartal remained in his seat. He was drawing pictures on large pieces of pasteboard, and as I stood there in the visiscreen room, I watched him. There was no doubt about it, the Martian was clever. He would make a few rapid lines on one of the pasteboards, rub it a little to get the proper shading and then go on to the next. In swift rotation likenesses of Ezra Karn, of myself, of Jimmy Baker, and of Antlers Park took form. Ezra spoke over my shoulder. "He's doing scenes for Grannie's new book," he said. "The old lady figures on using the events here for a plot. Look at that damned nosy bird! " A silver cockatoo had alighted on the kite car and was surveying curiously Xartal's work. As each drawing was completed, the bird scanned it with rapt attention. Abruptly it flew to the top of the eyrie, where it seemed to be having a consultation with its bird companions. And then abruptly it happened. The cockatoos took off in mass flight. A group of Earth people suddenly materialized on the eyrie, talking and moving about as if it were the most natural thing in the world. With a shock I saw the likeness of myself; I saw Ezra Karn; and I saw the image of Jimmy Baker. The real Jimmy Baker stood next to Grannie, staring up at this incredible mirage. Grannie let out a whoop. "I've got it!" she said. "Those things we see up there are nothing more than mental images. They're Xartal's drawings!" "Don't you see," the lady continued. "Everything that Xartal put on paper has been seen by one or more of these cockatoos. The cockatoos are like Earth parrots all right, but not only have they the power of copying speech, they also have the ability to recreate a mental image of what they have seen. In other words their brains form a powerful photographic impression of the object. That impression is then transmitted simultaneously in telepathic wavelengths to common foci. That eyrie might be likened to a cinema screen, receiving brain vibrations from a hundred different sources that blend into the light field to form what are apparently three-dimensional images." The Larynx manager nodded slowly. "I see," he said. "But why don't the birds reconstruct images from the actual person. Why use drawings?" "Probably because the drawings are exaggerated in certain details and made a greater impression on their brains," Grannie replied. Up on the eyrie a strange performance was taking place. The duplicate of Grannie Annie was bowing to the duplicate of Jimmy Baker, and the image of Ezra Karn was playing leap frog with the image of Antlers Park. Then abruptly the screen before me blurred and went blank. "Sorry," the operator said. "I've used too much power already. Have to give the generators a chance to build it up again." Nodding, I turned and motioned to Karn. We went back downstairs. "That explains something at any rate," the old prospector said. "But how about that Red spot fever?" On Jimmy Baker's desk was a large file marked: FEVER VICTIMS. I opened it and found it contained the case histories of those men who had been attacked by the strange malady. Reading them over, I was struck by one detail. Each patient had received the first symptoms, not while working in the mines, but while sleeping or lounging in the barracks. Five minutes later Karn and I were striding down a white ramp that led to the nearest barracks. The building came into sight, a low rectangular structure, dome-roofed to withstand the violent winds. Inside double tiers of bunks stretched along either wall. In those bunks some thirty men lay sleeping. The far wall was taken up by a huge window of denvo-quartz. As I stood there, something suddenly caught Ezra Karn's eye. He began to walk toward that window. "Look here," he said. Six feet up on that window a small almost imperceptible button of dull metal had been wedged into an aperture cut in the quartz. The central part of the button appeared to be a powerful lens of some kind, and as I seized it and pulled it loose, I felt the hum of tiny clock work. All at once I had it! Red spot fever. Heat fever from the infra-red rays of Jupiter's great spot. Someone had constructed this lens to concentrate and amplify the power of those rays. The internal clockwork served a double purpose. It opened a shutter, and it rotated the lens slowly so that it played for a time on each of the sleeping men. I slid the metal button in my pocket and left the barracks at a run. Back in the visiscreen room, I snapped to the operator: "Turn it on!" The kite car swam into view in the screen above the instrument panel. I stared with open eyes. Jimmy Baker no longer was in the car, nor was Xartal, the Martian. Grannie Annie was there, but seated at the controls was Antlers Park, the manager of Interstellar Voice. Ezra Karn jabbed my elbow. "Grannie's coming back. I thought she'd be getting sick of this blamed moon." It didn't make sense. In all the years I'd known Annabella C. Flowers, never yet had I seen her desert a case until she had woven the clues and facts to a logical conclusion. "Ezra," I said, "we're going to drive out and meet them. There's something screwy here." Ten minutes later in another kite car we were driving at a fast clip through the powdery sands of the Baldric. And before long we saw another car approaching. It was Grannie. As the car drew up alongside I saw her sitting in her prim way next to Antlers Park. Park said: "We left the others at the mine. Miss Flowers is going back with me to my offices to help me improve the formula for that new antitoxin." He waved his hand, and the car moved off. I watched it as it sped across the desert, and a growing suspicion began to form in my mind. Then, like a knife thrust, the truth struck me. "Ezra!" I yelled, swinging the car. "That wasn't Grannie! That was one of those damned cockatoo images. We've got to catch him." The other car was some distance ahead now. Park looked back and saw us following. He did something to the kite wire, and his car leaped ahead. I threw the speed indicator hard over. Our kite was a huge box affair with a steady powerful pull to the connecting wire. Park's vehicle was drawn by a flat triangular kite that dove and fluttered with each variance of the wind. Steadily we began to close in. The manager of Interstellar Voice turned again, and something glinted in his hand. There was a flash of purple flame, and a round hole appeared in our windscreen inches above Karn's head. "Heat gun!" Ezra yelled. Now we were rocketing over the sand dunes, winding in and out between the flagpole trees. I had to catch that car I told myself. Grannie Annie's very life might be at stake, not to mention the lives of hundreds of mine workers. Again Park took aim and again a hole shattered our windscreen. The wind shifted and blew from another quarter. The box kite soared, but the triangular kite faltered. Taking advantage of Park's loss of speed, I raced alongside. The I. V. manager lifted his weapon frantically. But before he could use it a third time, Ezra Karn had whipped a lariat from his belt and sent it coiling across the intervening space. The thong yanked tight about the manager's throat. Park did the only thing he could do. He shut off power, and the two cars coasted to a halt. Then I was across in the other seat, wrenching the weapon free from his grasp. "What have you done with Miss Flowers?" I demanded. The manager's eyes glittered with fear as he saw my finger tense on the trigger. Weakly he lifted an arm and pointed to the northwest. "Val-ley. Thir-ty miles. Entrance hidden by wall of ... flagpole trees." I leaped into the driver's seat and gave the kite its head. And now the country began to undergo a subtle change. The trees seemed to group themselves in a long flanking corridor in a northwesterly direction, as if to hide some secret that lay beyond. Twice I attempted to penetrate that wall, only to find my way blocked by those curious growths. Then a corridor opened before me; a mile forward and the desert began again. But it was a new desert this time: the sand packed hard as granite, the way ahead utterly devoid of vegetation. In the distance black bulging hills extended to right and left, with a narrow chasm or doorway between. I headed for that entrance, and when I reached it, I shut off power with an exclamation of astonishment. There was a huge chair-shaped rock there, and seated upon it was Grannie Annie. She had a tablet in her hands, and she was writing. "Grannie!" I yelled. "What're you doing here? Where's Mr. Baker?" She rose to her feet and clambered down the rock. "Getting back Jimmy's mine laborers," she said, a twinkle in her eyes. "I see you've got Antlers Park. I'm glad of that. It saves me a lot of trouble." She took off her spectacles and wiped them on her sleeve. "Don't look so fuddled, Billy-boy. Come along, and I'll show you." She led the way through the narrow passage into the valley. A deep gorge, it was, with the black sheer cliffs on either side pressing close. Ten feet forward, I stopped short, staring in amazement. Advancing toward me like a column of infantry came a long line of Larynx miners. They walked slowly, looking straight ahead, moving down the center of the gorge toward the entrance. But there was more! A kite car was drawn up to the side. The windscreen had been removed, and mounted on the hood was a large bullet-like contrivance that looked not unlike a search lamp. A blinding shaft of bluish radiance spewed from its open end. Playing it back and forth upon the marching men were Jimmy Baker and Xartal, the Martian. "Ultra violet," Grannie Annie explained. "The opposite end of the vibratory scale and the only thing that will combat the infra-red rays that cause red spot fever. Those men won't stop walking until they've reached Shaft Four." Grannie Annie told her story during the long ride back to Shaft Four. We drove slowly, keeping the line of marching Larynx miners always ahead of us. Jimmy Baker had struck a new big lode of Acoustix, a lode which if worked successfully would see Larynx Incorporated become a far more powerful exporting concern than Interstellar Voice . Antlers Park didn't want that. It was he or his agents who placed those lens buttons in the Larynx barracks. For he knew that just as Jupiter's great spot was responsible for a climate and atmosphere suitable for an Earthman on this Eighth Moon, so also was that spot a deadly power in itself, capable when its rays were concentrated of causing a fatal sickness. Then suddenly becoming fearful of Grannie's prying, Antlers Park strove to head her off before she reached Shaft Four. He did head her off and managed to lure her and Baker and Xartal into the Shaft barracks where they would be exposed to the rays from the lens button. But Grannie only pretended to contract the plague. Park then attempted to outwit Ezra Karn and me by returning in Jimmy Baker's kite car with a cockatoo image of Grannie. I listened to all this in silence. "But," I said when she had finished, "how did Park manage to have that image created and why did the mine laborers walk out into the Baldric when they contracted the fever?" Grannie Annie frowned. "I'm not sure I can answer the first of those questions," she replied. "You must remember Antlers Park has been on this moon five years and during that time he must have acquainted himself with many of its secrets. Probably he learned long ago just what to do to make a cockatoo create a mental image. "As for the men going out into the Baldric, that was more of Park's diabolical work. In the walls of the barracks besides those lens buttons were also miniature electro-hypnotic plates, with the master controlling unit located in that valley. Park knew that when the miners were in a drugged condition from the effects of the fever they would be susceptible to the machine's lure.... And now, Billy-boy, are you coming with me?" "Coming with you?" I repeated. "Where?" The old lady lit a cigarette. "Pluto maybe," she said. "There's a penal colony there, you know, and that ought to tie in nicely with a new crime story. I can see it now ... prison break, stolen rocket ship, fugitives lurking in the interplanetary lanes...." "Grannie," I laughed. "You're incorrigible!"

What is the importance of Acoustix in the story?

10

It is a precious, lightweight ore found on at least one of Jupiter’s moons (eighth moon) that is highly valuable on Mars, but of no value on Earth. Martians are able to speak out loud as Earthlings do by supersonically amplifying their thoughts. As Martians grow beyond middle age, they are no longer able to do this amplification without the assistance of the Acoustix ore. Thus, it is highly valuable to them. The ore is the only reason for colonization of Jupiter’s moons, and there are two main companies that mine it - Interstellar Voice, Larynx Incorporated. It becomes a source of greed, which causes the manager of Interstellar Voice (Antlers Karn) to attempt sabotage against the other company, serving as the main climax of the story.

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Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net DOUBLE TROUBLE by CARL JACOBI Grannie Annie, that waspish science-fiction writer, was in a jam again. What with red-spot fever, talking cockatoos and flagpole trees, I was running in circles—especially since Grannie became twins every now and then. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] We had left the offices of Interstellar Voice three days ago, Earth time, and now as the immense disc of Jupiter flamed across the sky, entered the outer limits of the Baldric. Grannie Annie strode in the lead, her absurd long-skirted black dress looking as out of place in this desert as the trees. Flagpole trees. They rose straight up like enormous cat-tails, with only a melon-shaped protuberance at the top to show they were a form of vegetation. Everything else was blanketed by the sand and the powerful wind that blew from all quarters. As we reached the first of those trees, Grannie came to a halt. "This is the Baldric all right. If my calculations are right, we've hit it at its narrowest spot." Ezra Karn took a greasy pipe from his lips and spat. "It looks like the rest of this God-forsaken moon," he said, "'ceptin for them sticks." Xartal, the Martian illustrator, said nothing. He was like that, taciturn, speaking only when spoken to. He could be excused this time, however, for this was only our third day on Jupiter's Eighth Moon, and the country was still strange to us. When Annabella C. Flowers, that renowned writer of science fiction, visiphoned me at Crater City, Mars, to meet her here, I had thought she was crazy. But Miss Flowers, known to her friends as Grannie Annie, had always been mildly crazy. If you haven't read her books, you've missed something. She's the author of Lady of the Green Flames , Lady of the Runaway Planet , Lady of the Crimson Space-Beast , and other works of science fiction. Blood-and-thunder as these books are, however, they have one redeeming feature—authenticity of background. Grannie Annie was the original research digger-upper, and when she laid the setting of a yarn on a star of the sixth magnitude, only a transportation-velocity of less than light could prevent her from visiting her "stage" in person. Therefore when she asked me to meet her at the landing field of Interstellar Voice on Jupiter's Eighth Moon, I knew she had another novel in the state of embryo. What I didn't expect was Ezra Karn. He was an old prospector Grannie had met, and he had become so attached to the authoress he now followed her wherever she went. As for Xartal, he was a Martian and was slated to do the illustrations for Grannie's new book. Five minutes after my ship had blasted down, the four of us met in the offices of Interstellar Voice . And then I was shaking hands with Antlers Park, the manager of I. V. himself. "Glad to meet you," he said cordially. "I've just been trying to persuade Miss Flowers not to attempt a trip into the Baldric." "What's the Baldric?" I had asked. Antlers Park flicked the ash from his cheroot and shrugged. "Will you believe me, sir," he said, "when I tell you I've been out here on this forsaken moon five years and don't rightly know myself?" I scowled at that; it didn't make sense. "However, as you perhaps know, the only reason for colonial activities here at all is because of the presence of an ore known as Acoustix. It's no use to the people of Earth but of untold value on Mars. I'm not up on the scientific reasons, but it seems that life on the red planet has developed with a supersonic method of vocal communication. The Martian speaks as the Earthman does, but he amplifies his thoughts' transmission by way of wave lengths as high as three million vibrations per second. The trouble is that by the time the average Martian reaches middle age, his ability to produce those vibrations steadily decreases. Then it was found that this ore, Acoustix, revitalized their sounding apparatus, and the rush was on." "What do you mean?" Park leaned back. "The rush to find more of the ore," he explained. "But up until now this moon is the only place where it can be found. "There are two companies here," he continued, " Interstellar Voice and Larynx Incorporated . Chap by the name of Jimmy Baker runs that. However, the point is, between the properties of these two companies stretches a band or belt which has become known as the Baldric. "There are two principal forms of life in the Baldric; flagpole trees and a species of ornithoid resembling cockatoos. So far no one has crossed the Baldric without trouble." "What sort of trouble?" Grannie Annie had demanded. And when Antlers Park stuttered evasively, the old lady snorted, "Fiddlesticks, I never saw trouble yet that couldn't be explained. We leave in an hour." So now here we were at the outer reaches of the Baldric, four travelers on foot with only the barest necessities in the way of equipment and supplies. I walked forward to get a closer view of one of the flagpole trees. And then abruptly I saw something else. A queer-looking bird squatted there in the sand, looking up at me. Silver in plumage, it resembled a parrot with a crest; and yet it didn't. In some strange way the thing was a hideous caricature. "Look what I found," I yelled. "What I found," said the cockatoo in a very human voice. "Thunder, it talks," I said amazed. "Talks," repeated the bird, blinking its eyes. The cockatoo repeated my last statement again, then rose on its short legs, flapped its wings once and soared off into the sky. Xartal, the Martian illustrator, already had a notebook in his hands and was sketching a likeness of the creature. Ten minutes later we were on the move again. We saw more silver cockatoos and more flagpole trees. Above us, the great disc of Jupiter began to descend toward the horizon. And then all at once Grannie stopped again, this time at the top of a high ridge. She shielded her eyes and stared off into the plain we had just crossed. "Billy-boy," she said to me in a strange voice, "look down there and tell me what you see." I followed the direction of her hand and a shock went through me from head to foot. Down there, slowly toiling across the sand, advanced a party of four persons. In the lead was a little old lady in a black dress. Behind her strode a grizzled Earth man in a flop-brimmed hat, another Earth man, and a Martian. Detail for detail they were a duplicate of ourselves! "A mirage!" said Ezra Karn. But it wasn't a mirage. As the party came closer, we could see that their lips were moving, and their voices became audible. I listened in awe. The duplicate of myself was talking to the duplicate of Grannie Annie, and she was replying in the most natural way. Steadily the four travelers approached. Then, when a dozen yards away, they suddenly faded like a negative exposed to light and disappeared. "What do you make of it?" I said in a hushed voice. Grannie shook her head. "Might be a form of mass hypnosis superinduced by some chemical radiations," she replied. "Whatever it is, we'd better watch our step. There's no telling what might lie ahead." We walked after that with taut nerves and watchful eyes, but we saw no repetition of the "mirage." The wind continued to blow ceaselessly, and the sand seemed to grow more and more powdery. For some time I had fixed my gaze on a dot in the sky which I supposed to be a high-flying cockatoo. As that dot continued to move across the heavens in a single direction, I called Grannie's attention to it. "It's a kite," she nodded. "There should be a car attached to it somewhere." She offered no further explanation, but a quarter of an hour later as we topped another rise a curious elliptical car with a long slanting windscreen came into view. Attached to its hood was a taut wire which slanted up into the sky to connect with the kite. A man was driving and when he saw us, he waved. Five minutes later Grannie was shaking his hand vigorously and mumbling introductions. "This is Jimmy Baker," she said. "He manages Larynx Incorporated , and he's the real reason we're here." I decided I liked Baker the moment I saw him. In his middle thirties, he was tall and lean, with pleasant blue eyes which even his sand goggles could not conceal. "I can't tell you how glad I am you're here, Grannie," he said. "If anybody can help me, you can." Grannie's eyes glittered. "Trouble with the mine laborers?" she questioned. Jimmy Baker nodded. He told his story over the roar of the wind as we headed back across the desert. Occasionally he touched a stud on an electric windlass to which the kite wire was attached. Apparently these adjustments moved planes or fins on the kite and accounted for the car's ability to move in any direction. "If I weren't a realist, I'd say that Larynx Incorporated has been bewitched," he began slowly. "We pay our men high wages and give them excellent living conditions with a vacation on Callisto every year. Up until a short time ago most of them were in excellent health and spirits. Then the Red Spot Fever got them." "Red Spot Fever?" Grannie looked at him curiously. Jimmy Baker nodded. "The first symptoms are a tendency to garrulousness on the part of the patient. Then they disappear." He paused to make an adjustment of the windlass. "They walk out into the Baldric," he continued, "and nothing can stop them. We tried following them, of course, but it was no go. As soon as they realize they're being followed, they stop. But the moment our eyes are turned, they give us the slip." "But surely you must have some idea of where they go," Grannie said. Baker lit a cigarette. "There's all kinds of rumors," he replied, "but none of them will hold water. By the way, there's a cockatoo eyrie ahead of us." I followed his gaze and saw a curious structure suspended between a rude circle of flagpole trees. A strange web-like formation of translucent gauzy material, it was. Fully two hundred cockatoos were perched upon it. They watched us with their mild eyes as we passed, but they didn't move. After that we were rolling up the driveway that led to the offices of Larynx Incorporated . As Jimmy Baker led the way up the inclined ramp, a door in the central building opened, and a man emerged. His face was drawn. "Mr. Baker," he said breathlessly, "seventy-five workers at Shaft Four have headed out into the Baldric." Baker dropped his cigarette and ground his heel on it savagely. "Shaft Four, eh?" he repeated. "That's our principal mine. If the fever spreads there, I'm licked." He motioned us into his office and strode across to a desk. Silent Xartal, the Martian illustrator, took a chair in a corner and got his notebook out, sketching the room's interior. Grannie Annie remained standing. Presently the old lady walked across to the desk and helped herself to the bottle of Martian whiskey there. "There must be ways of stopping this," she said. "Have you called in any physicians? Why don't you call an enforced vacation and send the men away until the plague has died down?" Baker shook his head. "Three doctors from Callisto were here last month. They were as much at loss as I am. As for sending the men away, I may have to do that, but when I do, it means quits. Our company is chartered with Spacolonial, and you know what that means. Failure to produce during a period of thirty days or more, and you lose all rights." A visiphone bell sounded, and Baker walked across to the instrument. A man's face formed in the vision plate. Baker listened, said "Okay" and threw off the switch. "The entire crew of Shaft Four have gone out into the Baldric," he said slowly. There was a large map hanging on the wall back of Baker's desk. Grannie Annie walked across to it and began to study its markings. "Shaft Four is at the outer edge of the Baldric at a point where that corridor is at its widest," she said. Baker looked up. "That's right. We only began operations there a comparatively short time ago. Struck a rich vein of Acoustix that runs deep in. If that vein holds out, we'll double the output of Interstellar Voice , our rival, in a year." Grannie nodded. "I think you and I and Xartal had better take a run up there," she said. "But first I want to see your laboratory." There was no refusing her. Jimmy Baker led the way down to a lower level where a huge laboratory and experimental shop ran the length of the building. Grannie seized a light weight carry-case and began dropping articles into it. A pontocated glass lens, three or four Wellington radite bulbs, each with a spectroscopic filament, a small dynamo that would operate on a kite windlass, and a quantity of wire and other items. The kite car was brought out again, and the old woman, Baker and the Martian took their places in it. Then Jimmy waved, and the car began to roll down the ramp. Not until they had vanished in the desert haze did I sense the loneliness of this outpost. With that loneliness came a sudden sense of foreboding. Had I been a fool to let Grannie go? I thought of her, an old woman who should be in a rocking chair, knitting socks. If anything happened to Annabella C. Flowers, I would never forgive myself and neither would her millions of readers. Ezra Karn and I went back into the office. The old prospector chuckled. "Dang human dynamo. Got more energy than a runaway comet." A connecting door on the far side of the office opened onto a long corridor which ended at a staircase. "Let's look around," I said. We passed down the corridor and climbed the staircase to the second floor. Here were the general offices of Larynx Incorporated , and through glass doors I could see clerks busy with counting machines and report tapes. In another chamber the extremely light Acoustix ore was being packed into big cases and marked for shipment. At the far end a door to a small room stood open. Inside a young man was tilted back in a swivel chair before a complicated instrument panel. "C'mon in," he said, seeing us. "If you want a look at your friends, here they are." He flicked a stud, and the entire wall above the panel underwent a slow change of colors. Those colors whirled kaleidescopically, then coalesced into a three-dimensional scene. It was a scene of a rapidly unfolding desert country as seen from the rear of a kite car. Directly behind the windscreen, backs turned to me, were Jimmy Baker, Grannie, and Xartal. It was as if I were standing directly behind them. "It's Mr. Baker's own invention," the operator said. "An improvement on the visiphone." "Do you mean to say you can follow the movements of that car and its passengers wherever it goes? Can you hear them talk too?" "Sure." The operator turned another dial, and Grannie's falsetto voice entered the room. It stopped abruptly. "The machine uses a lot of power," the operator said, "and as yet we haven't got much." The cloud of anxiety which had wrapped itself about me disappeared somewhat as I viewed this device. At least I could now keep myself posted of Grannie's movements. Karn and I went down to the commissary where we ate our supper. When we returned to Jimmy Baker's office, the visiphone bell was ringing. I went over to it and turned it on, and to my surprise the face of Antlers Park flashed on the screen. "Hello," he said in his friendly way. "I see you arrived all right. Is Miss Flowers there?" "Miss Flowers left with Mr. Baker for Shaft Four," I said. "There's trouble up there. Red spot fever." "Fever, eh?" repeated Park. "That's a shame. Is there anything I can do?" "Tell me," I said, "has your company had any trouble with this plague?" "A little. But up until yesterday the fever's been confined to the other side of the Baldric. We had one partial case, but my chemists gave the chap an antitoxin that seems to have worked. Come to think of it, I might drive over to Shaft Four and give Jimmy Baker the formula. I haven't been out in the Baldric for years, but if you didn't have any trouble, I shouldn't either." We exchanged a few more pleasantries, and then he rang off. In exactly an hour I went upstairs to the visiscreen room. Then once more I was directly behind my friends, listening in on their conversation. The view through the windscreen showed an irregular array of flagpole trees, with the sky dotted by high-flying cockatoos. "There's an eyrie over there," Jimmy Baker was saying. "We might as well camp beside it." Moments later a rude circle of flagpole trees loomed ahead. Across the top of them was stretched a translucent web. Jimmy and Grannie got out of the car and began making camp. Xartal remained in his seat. He was drawing pictures on large pieces of pasteboard, and as I stood there in the visiscreen room, I watched him. There was no doubt about it, the Martian was clever. He would make a few rapid lines on one of the pasteboards, rub it a little to get the proper shading and then go on to the next. In swift rotation likenesses of Ezra Karn, of myself, of Jimmy Baker, and of Antlers Park took form. Ezra spoke over my shoulder. "He's doing scenes for Grannie's new book," he said. "The old lady figures on using the events here for a plot. Look at that damned nosy bird! " A silver cockatoo had alighted on the kite car and was surveying curiously Xartal's work. As each drawing was completed, the bird scanned it with rapt attention. Abruptly it flew to the top of the eyrie, where it seemed to be having a consultation with its bird companions. And then abruptly it happened. The cockatoos took off in mass flight. A group of Earth people suddenly materialized on the eyrie, talking and moving about as if it were the most natural thing in the world. With a shock I saw the likeness of myself; I saw Ezra Karn; and I saw the image of Jimmy Baker. The real Jimmy Baker stood next to Grannie, staring up at this incredible mirage. Grannie let out a whoop. "I've got it!" she said. "Those things we see up there are nothing more than mental images. They're Xartal's drawings!" "Don't you see," the lady continued. "Everything that Xartal put on paper has been seen by one or more of these cockatoos. The cockatoos are like Earth parrots all right, but not only have they the power of copying speech, they also have the ability to recreate a mental image of what they have seen. In other words their brains form a powerful photographic impression of the object. That impression is then transmitted simultaneously in telepathic wavelengths to common foci. That eyrie might be likened to a cinema screen, receiving brain vibrations from a hundred different sources that blend into the light field to form what are apparently three-dimensional images." The Larynx manager nodded slowly. "I see," he said. "But why don't the birds reconstruct images from the actual person. Why use drawings?" "Probably because the drawings are exaggerated in certain details and made a greater impression on their brains," Grannie replied. Up on the eyrie a strange performance was taking place. The duplicate of Grannie Annie was bowing to the duplicate of Jimmy Baker, and the image of Ezra Karn was playing leap frog with the image of Antlers Park. Then abruptly the screen before me blurred and went blank. "Sorry," the operator said. "I've used too much power already. Have to give the generators a chance to build it up again." Nodding, I turned and motioned to Karn. We went back downstairs. "That explains something at any rate," the old prospector said. "But how about that Red spot fever?" On Jimmy Baker's desk was a large file marked: FEVER VICTIMS. I opened it and found it contained the case histories of those men who had been attacked by the strange malady. Reading them over, I was struck by one detail. Each patient had received the first symptoms, not while working in the mines, but while sleeping or lounging in the barracks. Five minutes later Karn and I were striding down a white ramp that led to the nearest barracks. The building came into sight, a low rectangular structure, dome-roofed to withstand the violent winds. Inside double tiers of bunks stretched along either wall. In those bunks some thirty men lay sleeping. The far wall was taken up by a huge window of denvo-quartz. As I stood there, something suddenly caught Ezra Karn's eye. He began to walk toward that window. "Look here," he said. Six feet up on that window a small almost imperceptible button of dull metal had been wedged into an aperture cut in the quartz. The central part of the button appeared to be a powerful lens of some kind, and as I seized it and pulled it loose, I felt the hum of tiny clock work. All at once I had it! Red spot fever. Heat fever from the infra-red rays of Jupiter's great spot. Someone had constructed this lens to concentrate and amplify the power of those rays. The internal clockwork served a double purpose. It opened a shutter, and it rotated the lens slowly so that it played for a time on each of the sleeping men. I slid the metal button in my pocket and left the barracks at a run. Back in the visiscreen room, I snapped to the operator: "Turn it on!" The kite car swam into view in the screen above the instrument panel. I stared with open eyes. Jimmy Baker no longer was in the car, nor was Xartal, the Martian. Grannie Annie was there, but seated at the controls was Antlers Park, the manager of Interstellar Voice. Ezra Karn jabbed my elbow. "Grannie's coming back. I thought she'd be getting sick of this blamed moon." It didn't make sense. In all the years I'd known Annabella C. Flowers, never yet had I seen her desert a case until she had woven the clues and facts to a logical conclusion. "Ezra," I said, "we're going to drive out and meet them. There's something screwy here." Ten minutes later in another kite car we were driving at a fast clip through the powdery sands of the Baldric. And before long we saw another car approaching. It was Grannie. As the car drew up alongside I saw her sitting in her prim way next to Antlers Park. Park said: "We left the others at the mine. Miss Flowers is going back with me to my offices to help me improve the formula for that new antitoxin." He waved his hand, and the car moved off. I watched it as it sped across the desert, and a growing suspicion began to form in my mind. Then, like a knife thrust, the truth struck me. "Ezra!" I yelled, swinging the car. "That wasn't Grannie! That was one of those damned cockatoo images. We've got to catch him." The other car was some distance ahead now. Park looked back and saw us following. He did something to the kite wire, and his car leaped ahead. I threw the speed indicator hard over. Our kite was a huge box affair with a steady powerful pull to the connecting wire. Park's vehicle was drawn by a flat triangular kite that dove and fluttered with each variance of the wind. Steadily we began to close in. The manager of Interstellar Voice turned again, and something glinted in his hand. There was a flash of purple flame, and a round hole appeared in our windscreen inches above Karn's head. "Heat gun!" Ezra yelled. Now we were rocketing over the sand dunes, winding in and out between the flagpole trees. I had to catch that car I told myself. Grannie Annie's very life might be at stake, not to mention the lives of hundreds of mine workers. Again Park took aim and again a hole shattered our windscreen. The wind shifted and blew from another quarter. The box kite soared, but the triangular kite faltered. Taking advantage of Park's loss of speed, I raced alongside. The I. V. manager lifted his weapon frantically. But before he could use it a third time, Ezra Karn had whipped a lariat from his belt and sent it coiling across the intervening space. The thong yanked tight about the manager's throat. Park did the only thing he could do. He shut off power, and the two cars coasted to a halt. Then I was across in the other seat, wrenching the weapon free from his grasp. "What have you done with Miss Flowers?" I demanded. The manager's eyes glittered with fear as he saw my finger tense on the trigger. Weakly he lifted an arm and pointed to the northwest. "Val-ley. Thir-ty miles. Entrance hidden by wall of ... flagpole trees." I leaped into the driver's seat and gave the kite its head. And now the country began to undergo a subtle change. The trees seemed to group themselves in a long flanking corridor in a northwesterly direction, as if to hide some secret that lay beyond. Twice I attempted to penetrate that wall, only to find my way blocked by those curious growths. Then a corridor opened before me; a mile forward and the desert began again. But it was a new desert this time: the sand packed hard as granite, the way ahead utterly devoid of vegetation. In the distance black bulging hills extended to right and left, with a narrow chasm or doorway between. I headed for that entrance, and when I reached it, I shut off power with an exclamation of astonishment. There was a huge chair-shaped rock there, and seated upon it was Grannie Annie. She had a tablet in her hands, and she was writing. "Grannie!" I yelled. "What're you doing here? Where's Mr. Baker?" She rose to her feet and clambered down the rock. "Getting back Jimmy's mine laborers," she said, a twinkle in her eyes. "I see you've got Antlers Park. I'm glad of that. It saves me a lot of trouble." She took off her spectacles and wiped them on her sleeve. "Don't look so fuddled, Billy-boy. Come along, and I'll show you." She led the way through the narrow passage into the valley. A deep gorge, it was, with the black sheer cliffs on either side pressing close. Ten feet forward, I stopped short, staring in amazement. Advancing toward me like a column of infantry came a long line of Larynx miners. They walked slowly, looking straight ahead, moving down the center of the gorge toward the entrance. But there was more! A kite car was drawn up to the side. The windscreen had been removed, and mounted on the hood was a large bullet-like contrivance that looked not unlike a search lamp. A blinding shaft of bluish radiance spewed from its open end. Playing it back and forth upon the marching men were Jimmy Baker and Xartal, the Martian. "Ultra violet," Grannie Annie explained. "The opposite end of the vibratory scale and the only thing that will combat the infra-red rays that cause red spot fever. Those men won't stop walking until they've reached Shaft Four." Grannie Annie told her story during the long ride back to Shaft Four. We drove slowly, keeping the line of marching Larynx miners always ahead of us. Jimmy Baker had struck a new big lode of Acoustix, a lode which if worked successfully would see Larynx Incorporated become a far more powerful exporting concern than Interstellar Voice . Antlers Park didn't want that. It was he or his agents who placed those lens buttons in the Larynx barracks. For he knew that just as Jupiter's great spot was responsible for a climate and atmosphere suitable for an Earthman on this Eighth Moon, so also was that spot a deadly power in itself, capable when its rays were concentrated of causing a fatal sickness. Then suddenly becoming fearful of Grannie's prying, Antlers Park strove to head her off before she reached Shaft Four. He did head her off and managed to lure her and Baker and Xartal into the Shaft barracks where they would be exposed to the rays from the lens button. But Grannie only pretended to contract the plague. Park then attempted to outwit Ezra Karn and me by returning in Jimmy Baker's kite car with a cockatoo image of Grannie. I listened to all this in silence. "But," I said when she had finished, "how did Park manage to have that image created and why did the mine laborers walk out into the Baldric when they contracted the fever?" Grannie Annie frowned. "I'm not sure I can answer the first of those questions," she replied. "You must remember Antlers Park has been on this moon five years and during that time he must have acquainted himself with many of its secrets. Probably he learned long ago just what to do to make a cockatoo create a mental image. "As for the men going out into the Baldric, that was more of Park's diabolical work. In the walls of the barracks besides those lens buttons were also miniature electro-hypnotic plates, with the master controlling unit located in that valley. Park knew that when the miners were in a drugged condition from the effects of the fever they would be susceptible to the machine's lure.... And now, Billy-boy, are you coming with me?" "Coming with you?" I repeated. "Where?" The old lady lit a cigarette. "Pluto maybe," she said. "There's a penal colony there, you know, and that ought to tie in nicely with a new crime story. I can see it now ... prison break, stolen rocket ship, fugitives lurking in the interplanetary lanes...." "Grannie," I laughed. "You're incorrigible!"

What is the importance of Acoustix in the story?

3

Acoustix is an ore found on Jupiter's eighth moon that helps older martians continue to amplify their thoughts with their supersonic communication methods that usually deteriorate once the Martian hits middle age. Although there is no use for it on Earth, it is the entire reason there is colonial presence on the moon, and the reason for the presence of the companies Interstellar Voice and Larynx Incorporated. The ore is therefore the primary point of competition between the two companies, and when Larynx Incorporated finds a new, rich source of the ore, Antlers Park decides he has to take action to keep Jimmy Baker's company from getting ahead. This is why Antlers made a small device to make the rays more concentrated, to shine them on the workers in the barracks, to give them Red Spot Fever. This would allow him to take over the area that is rich in ore.

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Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net DOUBLE TROUBLE by CARL JACOBI Grannie Annie, that waspish science-fiction writer, was in a jam again. What with red-spot fever, talking cockatoos and flagpole trees, I was running in circles—especially since Grannie became twins every now and then. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] We had left the offices of Interstellar Voice three days ago, Earth time, and now as the immense disc of Jupiter flamed across the sky, entered the outer limits of the Baldric. Grannie Annie strode in the lead, her absurd long-skirted black dress looking as out of place in this desert as the trees. Flagpole trees. They rose straight up like enormous cat-tails, with only a melon-shaped protuberance at the top to show they were a form of vegetation. Everything else was blanketed by the sand and the powerful wind that blew from all quarters. As we reached the first of those trees, Grannie came to a halt. "This is the Baldric all right. If my calculations are right, we've hit it at its narrowest spot." Ezra Karn took a greasy pipe from his lips and spat. "It looks like the rest of this God-forsaken moon," he said, "'ceptin for them sticks." Xartal, the Martian illustrator, said nothing. He was like that, taciturn, speaking only when spoken to. He could be excused this time, however, for this was only our third day on Jupiter's Eighth Moon, and the country was still strange to us. When Annabella C. Flowers, that renowned writer of science fiction, visiphoned me at Crater City, Mars, to meet her here, I had thought she was crazy. But Miss Flowers, known to her friends as Grannie Annie, had always been mildly crazy. If you haven't read her books, you've missed something. She's the author of Lady of the Green Flames , Lady of the Runaway Planet , Lady of the Crimson Space-Beast , and other works of science fiction. Blood-and-thunder as these books are, however, they have one redeeming feature—authenticity of background. Grannie Annie was the original research digger-upper, and when she laid the setting of a yarn on a star of the sixth magnitude, only a transportation-velocity of less than light could prevent her from visiting her "stage" in person. Therefore when she asked me to meet her at the landing field of Interstellar Voice on Jupiter's Eighth Moon, I knew she had another novel in the state of embryo. What I didn't expect was Ezra Karn. He was an old prospector Grannie had met, and he had become so attached to the authoress he now followed her wherever she went. As for Xartal, he was a Martian and was slated to do the illustrations for Grannie's new book. Five minutes after my ship had blasted down, the four of us met in the offices of Interstellar Voice . And then I was shaking hands with Antlers Park, the manager of I. V. himself. "Glad to meet you," he said cordially. "I've just been trying to persuade Miss Flowers not to attempt a trip into the Baldric." "What's the Baldric?" I had asked. Antlers Park flicked the ash from his cheroot and shrugged. "Will you believe me, sir," he said, "when I tell you I've been out here on this forsaken moon five years and don't rightly know myself?" I scowled at that; it didn't make sense. "However, as you perhaps know, the only reason for colonial activities here at all is because of the presence of an ore known as Acoustix. It's no use to the people of Earth but of untold value on Mars. I'm not up on the scientific reasons, but it seems that life on the red planet has developed with a supersonic method of vocal communication. The Martian speaks as the Earthman does, but he amplifies his thoughts' transmission by way of wave lengths as high as three million vibrations per second. The trouble is that by the time the average Martian reaches middle age, his ability to produce those vibrations steadily decreases. Then it was found that this ore, Acoustix, revitalized their sounding apparatus, and the rush was on." "What do you mean?" Park leaned back. "The rush to find more of the ore," he explained. "But up until now this moon is the only place where it can be found. "There are two companies here," he continued, " Interstellar Voice and Larynx Incorporated . Chap by the name of Jimmy Baker runs that. However, the point is, between the properties of these two companies stretches a band or belt which has become known as the Baldric. "There are two principal forms of life in the Baldric; flagpole trees and a species of ornithoid resembling cockatoos. So far no one has crossed the Baldric without trouble." "What sort of trouble?" Grannie Annie had demanded. And when Antlers Park stuttered evasively, the old lady snorted, "Fiddlesticks, I never saw trouble yet that couldn't be explained. We leave in an hour." So now here we were at the outer reaches of the Baldric, four travelers on foot with only the barest necessities in the way of equipment and supplies. I walked forward to get a closer view of one of the flagpole trees. And then abruptly I saw something else. A queer-looking bird squatted there in the sand, looking up at me. Silver in plumage, it resembled a parrot with a crest; and yet it didn't. In some strange way the thing was a hideous caricature. "Look what I found," I yelled. "What I found," said the cockatoo in a very human voice. "Thunder, it talks," I said amazed. "Talks," repeated the bird, blinking its eyes. The cockatoo repeated my last statement again, then rose on its short legs, flapped its wings once and soared off into the sky. Xartal, the Martian illustrator, already had a notebook in his hands and was sketching a likeness of the creature. Ten minutes later we were on the move again. We saw more silver cockatoos and more flagpole trees. Above us, the great disc of Jupiter began to descend toward the horizon. And then all at once Grannie stopped again, this time at the top of a high ridge. She shielded her eyes and stared off into the plain we had just crossed. "Billy-boy," she said to me in a strange voice, "look down there and tell me what you see." I followed the direction of her hand and a shock went through me from head to foot. Down there, slowly toiling across the sand, advanced a party of four persons. In the lead was a little old lady in a black dress. Behind her strode a grizzled Earth man in a flop-brimmed hat, another Earth man, and a Martian. Detail for detail they were a duplicate of ourselves! "A mirage!" said Ezra Karn. But it wasn't a mirage. As the party came closer, we could see that their lips were moving, and their voices became audible. I listened in awe. The duplicate of myself was talking to the duplicate of Grannie Annie, and she was replying in the most natural way. Steadily the four travelers approached. Then, when a dozen yards away, they suddenly faded like a negative exposed to light and disappeared. "What do you make of it?" I said in a hushed voice. Grannie shook her head. "Might be a form of mass hypnosis superinduced by some chemical radiations," she replied. "Whatever it is, we'd better watch our step. There's no telling what might lie ahead." We walked after that with taut nerves and watchful eyes, but we saw no repetition of the "mirage." The wind continued to blow ceaselessly, and the sand seemed to grow more and more powdery. For some time I had fixed my gaze on a dot in the sky which I supposed to be a high-flying cockatoo. As that dot continued to move across the heavens in a single direction, I called Grannie's attention to it. "It's a kite," she nodded. "There should be a car attached to it somewhere." She offered no further explanation, but a quarter of an hour later as we topped another rise a curious elliptical car with a long slanting windscreen came into view. Attached to its hood was a taut wire which slanted up into the sky to connect with the kite. A man was driving and when he saw us, he waved. Five minutes later Grannie was shaking his hand vigorously and mumbling introductions. "This is Jimmy Baker," she said. "He manages Larynx Incorporated , and he's the real reason we're here." I decided I liked Baker the moment I saw him. In his middle thirties, he was tall and lean, with pleasant blue eyes which even his sand goggles could not conceal. "I can't tell you how glad I am you're here, Grannie," he said. "If anybody can help me, you can." Grannie's eyes glittered. "Trouble with the mine laborers?" she questioned. Jimmy Baker nodded. He told his story over the roar of the wind as we headed back across the desert. Occasionally he touched a stud on an electric windlass to which the kite wire was attached. Apparently these adjustments moved planes or fins on the kite and accounted for the car's ability to move in any direction. "If I weren't a realist, I'd say that Larynx Incorporated has been bewitched," he began slowly. "We pay our men high wages and give them excellent living conditions with a vacation on Callisto every year. Up until a short time ago most of them were in excellent health and spirits. Then the Red Spot Fever got them." "Red Spot Fever?" Grannie looked at him curiously. Jimmy Baker nodded. "The first symptoms are a tendency to garrulousness on the part of the patient. Then they disappear." He paused to make an adjustment of the windlass. "They walk out into the Baldric," he continued, "and nothing can stop them. We tried following them, of course, but it was no go. As soon as they realize they're being followed, they stop. But the moment our eyes are turned, they give us the slip." "But surely you must have some idea of where they go," Grannie said. Baker lit a cigarette. "There's all kinds of rumors," he replied, "but none of them will hold water. By the way, there's a cockatoo eyrie ahead of us." I followed his gaze and saw a curious structure suspended between a rude circle of flagpole trees. A strange web-like formation of translucent gauzy material, it was. Fully two hundred cockatoos were perched upon it. They watched us with their mild eyes as we passed, but they didn't move. After that we were rolling up the driveway that led to the offices of Larynx Incorporated . As Jimmy Baker led the way up the inclined ramp, a door in the central building opened, and a man emerged. His face was drawn. "Mr. Baker," he said breathlessly, "seventy-five workers at Shaft Four have headed out into the Baldric." Baker dropped his cigarette and ground his heel on it savagely. "Shaft Four, eh?" he repeated. "That's our principal mine. If the fever spreads there, I'm licked." He motioned us into his office and strode across to a desk. Silent Xartal, the Martian illustrator, took a chair in a corner and got his notebook out, sketching the room's interior. Grannie Annie remained standing. Presently the old lady walked across to the desk and helped herself to the bottle of Martian whiskey there. "There must be ways of stopping this," she said. "Have you called in any physicians? Why don't you call an enforced vacation and send the men away until the plague has died down?" Baker shook his head. "Three doctors from Callisto were here last month. They were as much at loss as I am. As for sending the men away, I may have to do that, but when I do, it means quits. Our company is chartered with Spacolonial, and you know what that means. Failure to produce during a period of thirty days or more, and you lose all rights." A visiphone bell sounded, and Baker walked across to the instrument. A man's face formed in the vision plate. Baker listened, said "Okay" and threw off the switch. "The entire crew of Shaft Four have gone out into the Baldric," he said slowly. There was a large map hanging on the wall back of Baker's desk. Grannie Annie walked across to it and began to study its markings. "Shaft Four is at the outer edge of the Baldric at a point where that corridor is at its widest," she said. Baker looked up. "That's right. We only began operations there a comparatively short time ago. Struck a rich vein of Acoustix that runs deep in. If that vein holds out, we'll double the output of Interstellar Voice , our rival, in a year." Grannie nodded. "I think you and I and Xartal had better take a run up there," she said. "But first I want to see your laboratory." There was no refusing her. Jimmy Baker led the way down to a lower level where a huge laboratory and experimental shop ran the length of the building. Grannie seized a light weight carry-case and began dropping articles into it. A pontocated glass lens, three or four Wellington radite bulbs, each with a spectroscopic filament, a small dynamo that would operate on a kite windlass, and a quantity of wire and other items. The kite car was brought out again, and the old woman, Baker and the Martian took their places in it. Then Jimmy waved, and the car began to roll down the ramp. Not until they had vanished in the desert haze did I sense the loneliness of this outpost. With that loneliness came a sudden sense of foreboding. Had I been a fool to let Grannie go? I thought of her, an old woman who should be in a rocking chair, knitting socks. If anything happened to Annabella C. Flowers, I would never forgive myself and neither would her millions of readers. Ezra Karn and I went back into the office. The old prospector chuckled. "Dang human dynamo. Got more energy than a runaway comet." A connecting door on the far side of the office opened onto a long corridor which ended at a staircase. "Let's look around," I said. We passed down the corridor and climbed the staircase to the second floor. Here were the general offices of Larynx Incorporated , and through glass doors I could see clerks busy with counting machines and report tapes. In another chamber the extremely light Acoustix ore was being packed into big cases and marked for shipment. At the far end a door to a small room stood open. Inside a young man was tilted back in a swivel chair before a complicated instrument panel. "C'mon in," he said, seeing us. "If you want a look at your friends, here they are." He flicked a stud, and the entire wall above the panel underwent a slow change of colors. Those colors whirled kaleidescopically, then coalesced into a three-dimensional scene. It was a scene of a rapidly unfolding desert country as seen from the rear of a kite car. Directly behind the windscreen, backs turned to me, were Jimmy Baker, Grannie, and Xartal. It was as if I were standing directly behind them. "It's Mr. Baker's own invention," the operator said. "An improvement on the visiphone." "Do you mean to say you can follow the movements of that car and its passengers wherever it goes? Can you hear them talk too?" "Sure." The operator turned another dial, and Grannie's falsetto voice entered the room. It stopped abruptly. "The machine uses a lot of power," the operator said, "and as yet we haven't got much." The cloud of anxiety which had wrapped itself about me disappeared somewhat as I viewed this device. At least I could now keep myself posted of Grannie's movements. Karn and I went down to the commissary where we ate our supper. When we returned to Jimmy Baker's office, the visiphone bell was ringing. I went over to it and turned it on, and to my surprise the face of Antlers Park flashed on the screen. "Hello," he said in his friendly way. "I see you arrived all right. Is Miss Flowers there?" "Miss Flowers left with Mr. Baker for Shaft Four," I said. "There's trouble up there. Red spot fever." "Fever, eh?" repeated Park. "That's a shame. Is there anything I can do?" "Tell me," I said, "has your company had any trouble with this plague?" "A little. But up until yesterday the fever's been confined to the other side of the Baldric. We had one partial case, but my chemists gave the chap an antitoxin that seems to have worked. Come to think of it, I might drive over to Shaft Four and give Jimmy Baker the formula. I haven't been out in the Baldric for years, but if you didn't have any trouble, I shouldn't either." We exchanged a few more pleasantries, and then he rang off. In exactly an hour I went upstairs to the visiscreen room. Then once more I was directly behind my friends, listening in on their conversation. The view through the windscreen showed an irregular array of flagpole trees, with the sky dotted by high-flying cockatoos. "There's an eyrie over there," Jimmy Baker was saying. "We might as well camp beside it." Moments later a rude circle of flagpole trees loomed ahead. Across the top of them was stretched a translucent web. Jimmy and Grannie got out of the car and began making camp. Xartal remained in his seat. He was drawing pictures on large pieces of pasteboard, and as I stood there in the visiscreen room, I watched him. There was no doubt about it, the Martian was clever. He would make a few rapid lines on one of the pasteboards, rub it a little to get the proper shading and then go on to the next. In swift rotation likenesses of Ezra Karn, of myself, of Jimmy Baker, and of Antlers Park took form. Ezra spoke over my shoulder. "He's doing scenes for Grannie's new book," he said. "The old lady figures on using the events here for a plot. Look at that damned nosy bird! " A silver cockatoo had alighted on the kite car and was surveying curiously Xartal's work. As each drawing was completed, the bird scanned it with rapt attention. Abruptly it flew to the top of the eyrie, where it seemed to be having a consultation with its bird companions. And then abruptly it happened. The cockatoos took off in mass flight. A group of Earth people suddenly materialized on the eyrie, talking and moving about as if it were the most natural thing in the world. With a shock I saw the likeness of myself; I saw Ezra Karn; and I saw the image of Jimmy Baker. The real Jimmy Baker stood next to Grannie, staring up at this incredible mirage. Grannie let out a whoop. "I've got it!" she said. "Those things we see up there are nothing more than mental images. They're Xartal's drawings!" "Don't you see," the lady continued. "Everything that Xartal put on paper has been seen by one or more of these cockatoos. The cockatoos are like Earth parrots all right, but not only have they the power of copying speech, they also have the ability to recreate a mental image of what they have seen. In other words their brains form a powerful photographic impression of the object. That impression is then transmitted simultaneously in telepathic wavelengths to common foci. That eyrie might be likened to a cinema screen, receiving brain vibrations from a hundred different sources that blend into the light field to form what are apparently three-dimensional images." The Larynx manager nodded slowly. "I see," he said. "But why don't the birds reconstruct images from the actual person. Why use drawings?" "Probably because the drawings are exaggerated in certain details and made a greater impression on their brains," Grannie replied. Up on the eyrie a strange performance was taking place. The duplicate of Grannie Annie was bowing to the duplicate of Jimmy Baker, and the image of Ezra Karn was playing leap frog with the image of Antlers Park. Then abruptly the screen before me blurred and went blank. "Sorry," the operator said. "I've used too much power already. Have to give the generators a chance to build it up again." Nodding, I turned and motioned to Karn. We went back downstairs. "That explains something at any rate," the old prospector said. "But how about that Red spot fever?" On Jimmy Baker's desk was a large file marked: FEVER VICTIMS. I opened it and found it contained the case histories of those men who had been attacked by the strange malady. Reading them over, I was struck by one detail. Each patient had received the first symptoms, not while working in the mines, but while sleeping or lounging in the barracks. Five minutes later Karn and I were striding down a white ramp that led to the nearest barracks. The building came into sight, a low rectangular structure, dome-roofed to withstand the violent winds. Inside double tiers of bunks stretched along either wall. In those bunks some thirty men lay sleeping. The far wall was taken up by a huge window of denvo-quartz. As I stood there, something suddenly caught Ezra Karn's eye. He began to walk toward that window. "Look here," he said. Six feet up on that window a small almost imperceptible button of dull metal had been wedged into an aperture cut in the quartz. The central part of the button appeared to be a powerful lens of some kind, and as I seized it and pulled it loose, I felt the hum of tiny clock work. All at once I had it! Red spot fever. Heat fever from the infra-red rays of Jupiter's great spot. Someone had constructed this lens to concentrate and amplify the power of those rays. The internal clockwork served a double purpose. It opened a shutter, and it rotated the lens slowly so that it played for a time on each of the sleeping men. I slid the metal button in my pocket and left the barracks at a run. Back in the visiscreen room, I snapped to the operator: "Turn it on!" The kite car swam into view in the screen above the instrument panel. I stared with open eyes. Jimmy Baker no longer was in the car, nor was Xartal, the Martian. Grannie Annie was there, but seated at the controls was Antlers Park, the manager of Interstellar Voice. Ezra Karn jabbed my elbow. "Grannie's coming back. I thought she'd be getting sick of this blamed moon." It didn't make sense. In all the years I'd known Annabella C. Flowers, never yet had I seen her desert a case until she had woven the clues and facts to a logical conclusion. "Ezra," I said, "we're going to drive out and meet them. There's something screwy here." Ten minutes later in another kite car we were driving at a fast clip through the powdery sands of the Baldric. And before long we saw another car approaching. It was Grannie. As the car drew up alongside I saw her sitting in her prim way next to Antlers Park. Park said: "We left the others at the mine. Miss Flowers is going back with me to my offices to help me improve the formula for that new antitoxin." He waved his hand, and the car moved off. I watched it as it sped across the desert, and a growing suspicion began to form in my mind. Then, like a knife thrust, the truth struck me. "Ezra!" I yelled, swinging the car. "That wasn't Grannie! That was one of those damned cockatoo images. We've got to catch him." The other car was some distance ahead now. Park looked back and saw us following. He did something to the kite wire, and his car leaped ahead. I threw the speed indicator hard over. Our kite was a huge box affair with a steady powerful pull to the connecting wire. Park's vehicle was drawn by a flat triangular kite that dove and fluttered with each variance of the wind. Steadily we began to close in. The manager of Interstellar Voice turned again, and something glinted in his hand. There was a flash of purple flame, and a round hole appeared in our windscreen inches above Karn's head. "Heat gun!" Ezra yelled. Now we were rocketing over the sand dunes, winding in and out between the flagpole trees. I had to catch that car I told myself. Grannie Annie's very life might be at stake, not to mention the lives of hundreds of mine workers. Again Park took aim and again a hole shattered our windscreen. The wind shifted and blew from another quarter. The box kite soared, but the triangular kite faltered. Taking advantage of Park's loss of speed, I raced alongside. The I. V. manager lifted his weapon frantically. But before he could use it a third time, Ezra Karn had whipped a lariat from his belt and sent it coiling across the intervening space. The thong yanked tight about the manager's throat. Park did the only thing he could do. He shut off power, and the two cars coasted to a halt. Then I was across in the other seat, wrenching the weapon free from his grasp. "What have you done with Miss Flowers?" I demanded. The manager's eyes glittered with fear as he saw my finger tense on the trigger. Weakly he lifted an arm and pointed to the northwest. "Val-ley. Thir-ty miles. Entrance hidden by wall of ... flagpole trees." I leaped into the driver's seat and gave the kite its head. And now the country began to undergo a subtle change. The trees seemed to group themselves in a long flanking corridor in a northwesterly direction, as if to hide some secret that lay beyond. Twice I attempted to penetrate that wall, only to find my way blocked by those curious growths. Then a corridor opened before me; a mile forward and the desert began again. But it was a new desert this time: the sand packed hard as granite, the way ahead utterly devoid of vegetation. In the distance black bulging hills extended to right and left, with a narrow chasm or doorway between. I headed for that entrance, and when I reached it, I shut off power with an exclamation of astonishment. There was a huge chair-shaped rock there, and seated upon it was Grannie Annie. She had a tablet in her hands, and she was writing. "Grannie!" I yelled. "What're you doing here? Where's Mr. Baker?" She rose to her feet and clambered down the rock. "Getting back Jimmy's mine laborers," she said, a twinkle in her eyes. "I see you've got Antlers Park. I'm glad of that. It saves me a lot of trouble." She took off her spectacles and wiped them on her sleeve. "Don't look so fuddled, Billy-boy. Come along, and I'll show you." She led the way through the narrow passage into the valley. A deep gorge, it was, with the black sheer cliffs on either side pressing close. Ten feet forward, I stopped short, staring in amazement. Advancing toward me like a column of infantry came a long line of Larynx miners. They walked slowly, looking straight ahead, moving down the center of the gorge toward the entrance. But there was more! A kite car was drawn up to the side. The windscreen had been removed, and mounted on the hood was a large bullet-like contrivance that looked not unlike a search lamp. A blinding shaft of bluish radiance spewed from its open end. Playing it back and forth upon the marching men were Jimmy Baker and Xartal, the Martian. "Ultra violet," Grannie Annie explained. "The opposite end of the vibratory scale and the only thing that will combat the infra-red rays that cause red spot fever. Those men won't stop walking until they've reached Shaft Four." Grannie Annie told her story during the long ride back to Shaft Four. We drove slowly, keeping the line of marching Larynx miners always ahead of us. Jimmy Baker had struck a new big lode of Acoustix, a lode which if worked successfully would see Larynx Incorporated become a far more powerful exporting concern than Interstellar Voice . Antlers Park didn't want that. It was he or his agents who placed those lens buttons in the Larynx barracks. For he knew that just as Jupiter's great spot was responsible for a climate and atmosphere suitable for an Earthman on this Eighth Moon, so also was that spot a deadly power in itself, capable when its rays were concentrated of causing a fatal sickness. Then suddenly becoming fearful of Grannie's prying, Antlers Park strove to head her off before she reached Shaft Four. He did head her off and managed to lure her and Baker and Xartal into the Shaft barracks where they would be exposed to the rays from the lens button. But Grannie only pretended to contract the plague. Park then attempted to outwit Ezra Karn and me by returning in Jimmy Baker's kite car with a cockatoo image of Grannie. I listened to all this in silence. "But," I said when she had finished, "how did Park manage to have that image created and why did the mine laborers walk out into the Baldric when they contracted the fever?" Grannie Annie frowned. "I'm not sure I can answer the first of those questions," she replied. "You must remember Antlers Park has been on this moon five years and during that time he must have acquainted himself with many of its secrets. Probably he learned long ago just what to do to make a cockatoo create a mental image. "As for the men going out into the Baldric, that was more of Park's diabolical work. In the walls of the barracks besides those lens buttons were also miniature electro-hypnotic plates, with the master controlling unit located in that valley. Park knew that when the miners were in a drugged condition from the effects of the fever they would be susceptible to the machine's lure.... And now, Billy-boy, are you coming with me?" "Coming with you?" I repeated. "Where?" The old lady lit a cigarette. "Pluto maybe," she said. "There's a penal colony there, you know, and that ought to tie in nicely with a new crime story. I can see it now ... prison break, stolen rocket ship, fugitives lurking in the interplanetary lanes...." "Grannie," I laughed. "You're incorrigible!"

What is the importance of Acoustix in the story?

8

Acoustix is an ore unique to Jupiter's Eighth Moon and is the reason for the presence of the mining operations of Intersteller Voice and Larynx Incorporated. As Antlers Park informs Billy, although the ore is useless to Earthmen, the Martians highly value it. Because Martians speak using a supersonic method, they are able to amplify their thoughts via high-frequency wavelengths. As they get older, this ability decreases, and the Acoustix has the ability to restore that ability to its previous strength. Jimmy Baker's company, Larynx Incorporated, has discovered a massive reserve of Acoustix that would essentially put them far ahead of their competition, and therefore Antlers Park works to sabotage them by spreading Red-Spot fever amongst his workers, knowing their discovery would hurt his own business, Interstellar Voice. Jimmy worries that the labor shortage will impair his company's ability to mine Shaft Four, which produces their largest share of Acoustix, and will lead to the termination of his charter through Spacolonial.

63442

Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net DOUBLE TROUBLE by CARL JACOBI Grannie Annie, that waspish science-fiction writer, was in a jam again. What with red-spot fever, talking cockatoos and flagpole trees, I was running in circles—especially since Grannie became twins every now and then. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] We had left the offices of Interstellar Voice three days ago, Earth time, and now as the immense disc of Jupiter flamed across the sky, entered the outer limits of the Baldric. Grannie Annie strode in the lead, her absurd long-skirted black dress looking as out of place in this desert as the trees. Flagpole trees. They rose straight up like enormous cat-tails, with only a melon-shaped protuberance at the top to show they were a form of vegetation. Everything else was blanketed by the sand and the powerful wind that blew from all quarters. As we reached the first of those trees, Grannie came to a halt. "This is the Baldric all right. If my calculations are right, we've hit it at its narrowest spot." Ezra Karn took a greasy pipe from his lips and spat. "It looks like the rest of this God-forsaken moon," he said, "'ceptin for them sticks." Xartal, the Martian illustrator, said nothing. He was like that, taciturn, speaking only when spoken to. He could be excused this time, however, for this was only our third day on Jupiter's Eighth Moon, and the country was still strange to us. When Annabella C. Flowers, that renowned writer of science fiction, visiphoned me at Crater City, Mars, to meet her here, I had thought she was crazy. But Miss Flowers, known to her friends as Grannie Annie, had always been mildly crazy. If you haven't read her books, you've missed something. She's the author of Lady of the Green Flames , Lady of the Runaway Planet , Lady of the Crimson Space-Beast , and other works of science fiction. Blood-and-thunder as these books are, however, they have one redeeming feature—authenticity of background. Grannie Annie was the original research digger-upper, and when she laid the setting of a yarn on a star of the sixth magnitude, only a transportation-velocity of less than light could prevent her from visiting her "stage" in person. Therefore when she asked me to meet her at the landing field of Interstellar Voice on Jupiter's Eighth Moon, I knew she had another novel in the state of embryo. What I didn't expect was Ezra Karn. He was an old prospector Grannie had met, and he had become so attached to the authoress he now followed her wherever she went. As for Xartal, he was a Martian and was slated to do the illustrations for Grannie's new book. Five minutes after my ship had blasted down, the four of us met in the offices of Interstellar Voice . And then I was shaking hands with Antlers Park, the manager of I. V. himself. "Glad to meet you," he said cordially. "I've just been trying to persuade Miss Flowers not to attempt a trip into the Baldric." "What's the Baldric?" I had asked. Antlers Park flicked the ash from his cheroot and shrugged. "Will you believe me, sir," he said, "when I tell you I've been out here on this forsaken moon five years and don't rightly know myself?" I scowled at that; it didn't make sense. "However, as you perhaps know, the only reason for colonial activities here at all is because of the presence of an ore known as Acoustix. It's no use to the people of Earth but of untold value on Mars. I'm not up on the scientific reasons, but it seems that life on the red planet has developed with a supersonic method of vocal communication. The Martian speaks as the Earthman does, but he amplifies his thoughts' transmission by way of wave lengths as high as three million vibrations per second. The trouble is that by the time the average Martian reaches middle age, his ability to produce those vibrations steadily decreases. Then it was found that this ore, Acoustix, revitalized their sounding apparatus, and the rush was on." "What do you mean?" Park leaned back. "The rush to find more of the ore," he explained. "But up until now this moon is the only place where it can be found. "There are two companies here," he continued, " Interstellar Voice and Larynx Incorporated . Chap by the name of Jimmy Baker runs that. However, the point is, between the properties of these two companies stretches a band or belt which has become known as the Baldric. "There are two principal forms of life in the Baldric; flagpole trees and a species of ornithoid resembling cockatoos. So far no one has crossed the Baldric without trouble." "What sort of trouble?" Grannie Annie had demanded. And when Antlers Park stuttered evasively, the old lady snorted, "Fiddlesticks, I never saw trouble yet that couldn't be explained. We leave in an hour." So now here we were at the outer reaches of the Baldric, four travelers on foot with only the barest necessities in the way of equipment and supplies. I walked forward to get a closer view of one of the flagpole trees. And then abruptly I saw something else. A queer-looking bird squatted there in the sand, looking up at me. Silver in plumage, it resembled a parrot with a crest; and yet it didn't. In some strange way the thing was a hideous caricature. "Look what I found," I yelled. "What I found," said the cockatoo in a very human voice. "Thunder, it talks," I said amazed. "Talks," repeated the bird, blinking its eyes. The cockatoo repeated my last statement again, then rose on its short legs, flapped its wings once and soared off into the sky. Xartal, the Martian illustrator, already had a notebook in his hands and was sketching a likeness of the creature. Ten minutes later we were on the move again. We saw more silver cockatoos and more flagpole trees. Above us, the great disc of Jupiter began to descend toward the horizon. And then all at once Grannie stopped again, this time at the top of a high ridge. She shielded her eyes and stared off into the plain we had just crossed. "Billy-boy," she said to me in a strange voice, "look down there and tell me what you see." I followed the direction of her hand and a shock went through me from head to foot. Down there, slowly toiling across the sand, advanced a party of four persons. In the lead was a little old lady in a black dress. Behind her strode a grizzled Earth man in a flop-brimmed hat, another Earth man, and a Martian. Detail for detail they were a duplicate of ourselves! "A mirage!" said Ezra Karn. But it wasn't a mirage. As the party came closer, we could see that their lips were moving, and their voices became audible. I listened in awe. The duplicate of myself was talking to the duplicate of Grannie Annie, and she was replying in the most natural way. Steadily the four travelers approached. Then, when a dozen yards away, they suddenly faded like a negative exposed to light and disappeared. "What do you make of it?" I said in a hushed voice. Grannie shook her head. "Might be a form of mass hypnosis superinduced by some chemical radiations," she replied. "Whatever it is, we'd better watch our step. There's no telling what might lie ahead." We walked after that with taut nerves and watchful eyes, but we saw no repetition of the "mirage." The wind continued to blow ceaselessly, and the sand seemed to grow more and more powdery. For some time I had fixed my gaze on a dot in the sky which I supposed to be a high-flying cockatoo. As that dot continued to move across the heavens in a single direction, I called Grannie's attention to it. "It's a kite," she nodded. "There should be a car attached to it somewhere." She offered no further explanation, but a quarter of an hour later as we topped another rise a curious elliptical car with a long slanting windscreen came into view. Attached to its hood was a taut wire which slanted up into the sky to connect with the kite. A man was driving and when he saw us, he waved. Five minutes later Grannie was shaking his hand vigorously and mumbling introductions. "This is Jimmy Baker," she said. "He manages Larynx Incorporated , and he's the real reason we're here." I decided I liked Baker the moment I saw him. In his middle thirties, he was tall and lean, with pleasant blue eyes which even his sand goggles could not conceal. "I can't tell you how glad I am you're here, Grannie," he said. "If anybody can help me, you can." Grannie's eyes glittered. "Trouble with the mine laborers?" she questioned. Jimmy Baker nodded. He told his story over the roar of the wind as we headed back across the desert. Occasionally he touched a stud on an electric windlass to which the kite wire was attached. Apparently these adjustments moved planes or fins on the kite and accounted for the car's ability to move in any direction. "If I weren't a realist, I'd say that Larynx Incorporated has been bewitched," he began slowly. "We pay our men high wages and give them excellent living conditions with a vacation on Callisto every year. Up until a short time ago most of them were in excellent health and spirits. Then the Red Spot Fever got them." "Red Spot Fever?" Grannie looked at him curiously. Jimmy Baker nodded. "The first symptoms are a tendency to garrulousness on the part of the patient. Then they disappear." He paused to make an adjustment of the windlass. "They walk out into the Baldric," he continued, "and nothing can stop them. We tried following them, of course, but it was no go. As soon as they realize they're being followed, they stop. But the moment our eyes are turned, they give us the slip." "But surely you must have some idea of where they go," Grannie said. Baker lit a cigarette. "There's all kinds of rumors," he replied, "but none of them will hold water. By the way, there's a cockatoo eyrie ahead of us." I followed his gaze and saw a curious structure suspended between a rude circle of flagpole trees. A strange web-like formation of translucent gauzy material, it was. Fully two hundred cockatoos were perched upon it. They watched us with their mild eyes as we passed, but they didn't move. After that we were rolling up the driveway that led to the offices of Larynx Incorporated . As Jimmy Baker led the way up the inclined ramp, a door in the central building opened, and a man emerged. His face was drawn. "Mr. Baker," he said breathlessly, "seventy-five workers at Shaft Four have headed out into the Baldric." Baker dropped his cigarette and ground his heel on it savagely. "Shaft Four, eh?" he repeated. "That's our principal mine. If the fever spreads there, I'm licked." He motioned us into his office and strode across to a desk. Silent Xartal, the Martian illustrator, took a chair in a corner and got his notebook out, sketching the room's interior. Grannie Annie remained standing. Presently the old lady walked across to the desk and helped herself to the bottle of Martian whiskey there. "There must be ways of stopping this," she said. "Have you called in any physicians? Why don't you call an enforced vacation and send the men away until the plague has died down?" Baker shook his head. "Three doctors from Callisto were here last month. They were as much at loss as I am. As for sending the men away, I may have to do that, but when I do, it means quits. Our company is chartered with Spacolonial, and you know what that means. Failure to produce during a period of thirty days or more, and you lose all rights." A visiphone bell sounded, and Baker walked across to the instrument. A man's face formed in the vision plate. Baker listened, said "Okay" and threw off the switch. "The entire crew of Shaft Four have gone out into the Baldric," he said slowly. There was a large map hanging on the wall back of Baker's desk. Grannie Annie walked across to it and began to study its markings. "Shaft Four is at the outer edge of the Baldric at a point where that corridor is at its widest," she said. Baker looked up. "That's right. We only began operations there a comparatively short time ago. Struck a rich vein of Acoustix that runs deep in. If that vein holds out, we'll double the output of Interstellar Voice , our rival, in a year." Grannie nodded. "I think you and I and Xartal had better take a run up there," she said. "But first I want to see your laboratory." There was no refusing her. Jimmy Baker led the way down to a lower level where a huge laboratory and experimental shop ran the length of the building. Grannie seized a light weight carry-case and began dropping articles into it. A pontocated glass lens, three or four Wellington radite bulbs, each with a spectroscopic filament, a small dynamo that would operate on a kite windlass, and a quantity of wire and other items. The kite car was brought out again, and the old woman, Baker and the Martian took their places in it. Then Jimmy waved, and the car began to roll down the ramp. Not until they had vanished in the desert haze did I sense the loneliness of this outpost. With that loneliness came a sudden sense of foreboding. Had I been a fool to let Grannie go? I thought of her, an old woman who should be in a rocking chair, knitting socks. If anything happened to Annabella C. Flowers, I would never forgive myself and neither would her millions of readers. Ezra Karn and I went back into the office. The old prospector chuckled. "Dang human dynamo. Got more energy than a runaway comet." A connecting door on the far side of the office opened onto a long corridor which ended at a staircase. "Let's look around," I said. We passed down the corridor and climbed the staircase to the second floor. Here were the general offices of Larynx Incorporated , and through glass doors I could see clerks busy with counting machines and report tapes. In another chamber the extremely light Acoustix ore was being packed into big cases and marked for shipment. At the far end a door to a small room stood open. Inside a young man was tilted back in a swivel chair before a complicated instrument panel. "C'mon in," he said, seeing us. "If you want a look at your friends, here they are." He flicked a stud, and the entire wall above the panel underwent a slow change of colors. Those colors whirled kaleidescopically, then coalesced into a three-dimensional scene. It was a scene of a rapidly unfolding desert country as seen from the rear of a kite car. Directly behind the windscreen, backs turned to me, were Jimmy Baker, Grannie, and Xartal. It was as if I were standing directly behind them. "It's Mr. Baker's own invention," the operator said. "An improvement on the visiphone." "Do you mean to say you can follow the movements of that car and its passengers wherever it goes? Can you hear them talk too?" "Sure." The operator turned another dial, and Grannie's falsetto voice entered the room. It stopped abruptly. "The machine uses a lot of power," the operator said, "and as yet we haven't got much." The cloud of anxiety which had wrapped itself about me disappeared somewhat as I viewed this device. At least I could now keep myself posted of Grannie's movements. Karn and I went down to the commissary where we ate our supper. When we returned to Jimmy Baker's office, the visiphone bell was ringing. I went over to it and turned it on, and to my surprise the face of Antlers Park flashed on the screen. "Hello," he said in his friendly way. "I see you arrived all right. Is Miss Flowers there?" "Miss Flowers left with Mr. Baker for Shaft Four," I said. "There's trouble up there. Red spot fever." "Fever, eh?" repeated Park. "That's a shame. Is there anything I can do?" "Tell me," I said, "has your company had any trouble with this plague?" "A little. But up until yesterday the fever's been confined to the other side of the Baldric. We had one partial case, but my chemists gave the chap an antitoxin that seems to have worked. Come to think of it, I might drive over to Shaft Four and give Jimmy Baker the formula. I haven't been out in the Baldric for years, but if you didn't have any trouble, I shouldn't either." We exchanged a few more pleasantries, and then he rang off. In exactly an hour I went upstairs to the visiscreen room. Then once more I was directly behind my friends, listening in on their conversation. The view through the windscreen showed an irregular array of flagpole trees, with the sky dotted by high-flying cockatoos. "There's an eyrie over there," Jimmy Baker was saying. "We might as well camp beside it." Moments later a rude circle of flagpole trees loomed ahead. Across the top of them was stretched a translucent web. Jimmy and Grannie got out of the car and began making camp. Xartal remained in his seat. He was drawing pictures on large pieces of pasteboard, and as I stood there in the visiscreen room, I watched him. There was no doubt about it, the Martian was clever. He would make a few rapid lines on one of the pasteboards, rub it a little to get the proper shading and then go on to the next. In swift rotation likenesses of Ezra Karn, of myself, of Jimmy Baker, and of Antlers Park took form. Ezra spoke over my shoulder. "He's doing scenes for Grannie's new book," he said. "The old lady figures on using the events here for a plot. Look at that damned nosy bird! " A silver cockatoo had alighted on the kite car and was surveying curiously Xartal's work. As each drawing was completed, the bird scanned it with rapt attention. Abruptly it flew to the top of the eyrie, where it seemed to be having a consultation with its bird companions. And then abruptly it happened. The cockatoos took off in mass flight. A group of Earth people suddenly materialized on the eyrie, talking and moving about as if it were the most natural thing in the world. With a shock I saw the likeness of myself; I saw Ezra Karn; and I saw the image of Jimmy Baker. The real Jimmy Baker stood next to Grannie, staring up at this incredible mirage. Grannie let out a whoop. "I've got it!" she said. "Those things we see up there are nothing more than mental images. They're Xartal's drawings!" "Don't you see," the lady continued. "Everything that Xartal put on paper has been seen by one or more of these cockatoos. The cockatoos are like Earth parrots all right, but not only have they the power of copying speech, they also have the ability to recreate a mental image of what they have seen. In other words their brains form a powerful photographic impression of the object. That impression is then transmitted simultaneously in telepathic wavelengths to common foci. That eyrie might be likened to a cinema screen, receiving brain vibrations from a hundred different sources that blend into the light field to form what are apparently three-dimensional images." The Larynx manager nodded slowly. "I see," he said. "But why don't the birds reconstruct images from the actual person. Why use drawings?" "Probably because the drawings are exaggerated in certain details and made a greater impression on their brains," Grannie replied. Up on the eyrie a strange performance was taking place. The duplicate of Grannie Annie was bowing to the duplicate of Jimmy Baker, and the image of Ezra Karn was playing leap frog with the image of Antlers Park. Then abruptly the screen before me blurred and went blank. "Sorry," the operator said. "I've used too much power already. Have to give the generators a chance to build it up again." Nodding, I turned and motioned to Karn. We went back downstairs. "That explains something at any rate," the old prospector said. "But how about that Red spot fever?" On Jimmy Baker's desk was a large file marked: FEVER VICTIMS. I opened it and found it contained the case histories of those men who had been attacked by the strange malady. Reading them over, I was struck by one detail. Each patient had received the first symptoms, not while working in the mines, but while sleeping or lounging in the barracks. Five minutes later Karn and I were striding down a white ramp that led to the nearest barracks. The building came into sight, a low rectangular structure, dome-roofed to withstand the violent winds. Inside double tiers of bunks stretched along either wall. In those bunks some thirty men lay sleeping. The far wall was taken up by a huge window of denvo-quartz. As I stood there, something suddenly caught Ezra Karn's eye. He began to walk toward that window. "Look here," he said. Six feet up on that window a small almost imperceptible button of dull metal had been wedged into an aperture cut in the quartz. The central part of the button appeared to be a powerful lens of some kind, and as I seized it and pulled it loose, I felt the hum of tiny clock work. All at once I had it! Red spot fever. Heat fever from the infra-red rays of Jupiter's great spot. Someone had constructed this lens to concentrate and amplify the power of those rays. The internal clockwork served a double purpose. It opened a shutter, and it rotated the lens slowly so that it played for a time on each of the sleeping men. I slid the metal button in my pocket and left the barracks at a run. Back in the visiscreen room, I snapped to the operator: "Turn it on!" The kite car swam into view in the screen above the instrument panel. I stared with open eyes. Jimmy Baker no longer was in the car, nor was Xartal, the Martian. Grannie Annie was there, but seated at the controls was Antlers Park, the manager of Interstellar Voice. Ezra Karn jabbed my elbow. "Grannie's coming back. I thought she'd be getting sick of this blamed moon." It didn't make sense. In all the years I'd known Annabella C. Flowers, never yet had I seen her desert a case until she had woven the clues and facts to a logical conclusion. "Ezra," I said, "we're going to drive out and meet them. There's something screwy here." Ten minutes later in another kite car we were driving at a fast clip through the powdery sands of the Baldric. And before long we saw another car approaching. It was Grannie. As the car drew up alongside I saw her sitting in her prim way next to Antlers Park. Park said: "We left the others at the mine. Miss Flowers is going back with me to my offices to help me improve the formula for that new antitoxin." He waved his hand, and the car moved off. I watched it as it sped across the desert, and a growing suspicion began to form in my mind. Then, like a knife thrust, the truth struck me. "Ezra!" I yelled, swinging the car. "That wasn't Grannie! That was one of those damned cockatoo images. We've got to catch him." The other car was some distance ahead now. Park looked back and saw us following. He did something to the kite wire, and his car leaped ahead. I threw the speed indicator hard over. Our kite was a huge box affair with a steady powerful pull to the connecting wire. Park's vehicle was drawn by a flat triangular kite that dove and fluttered with each variance of the wind. Steadily we began to close in. The manager of Interstellar Voice turned again, and something glinted in his hand. There was a flash of purple flame, and a round hole appeared in our windscreen inches above Karn's head. "Heat gun!" Ezra yelled. Now we were rocketing over the sand dunes, winding in and out between the flagpole trees. I had to catch that car I told myself. Grannie Annie's very life might be at stake, not to mention the lives of hundreds of mine workers. Again Park took aim and again a hole shattered our windscreen. The wind shifted and blew from another quarter. The box kite soared, but the triangular kite faltered. Taking advantage of Park's loss of speed, I raced alongside. The I. V. manager lifted his weapon frantically. But before he could use it a third time, Ezra Karn had whipped a lariat from his belt and sent it coiling across the intervening space. The thong yanked tight about the manager's throat. Park did the only thing he could do. He shut off power, and the two cars coasted to a halt. Then I was across in the other seat, wrenching the weapon free from his grasp. "What have you done with Miss Flowers?" I demanded. The manager's eyes glittered with fear as he saw my finger tense on the trigger. Weakly he lifted an arm and pointed to the northwest. "Val-ley. Thir-ty miles. Entrance hidden by wall of ... flagpole trees." I leaped into the driver's seat and gave the kite its head. And now the country began to undergo a subtle change. The trees seemed to group themselves in a long flanking corridor in a northwesterly direction, as if to hide some secret that lay beyond. Twice I attempted to penetrate that wall, only to find my way blocked by those curious growths. Then a corridor opened before me; a mile forward and the desert began again. But it was a new desert this time: the sand packed hard as granite, the way ahead utterly devoid of vegetation. In the distance black bulging hills extended to right and left, with a narrow chasm or doorway between. I headed for that entrance, and when I reached it, I shut off power with an exclamation of astonishment. There was a huge chair-shaped rock there, and seated upon it was Grannie Annie. She had a tablet in her hands, and she was writing. "Grannie!" I yelled. "What're you doing here? Where's Mr. Baker?" She rose to her feet and clambered down the rock. "Getting back Jimmy's mine laborers," she said, a twinkle in her eyes. "I see you've got Antlers Park. I'm glad of that. It saves me a lot of trouble." She took off her spectacles and wiped them on her sleeve. "Don't look so fuddled, Billy-boy. Come along, and I'll show you." She led the way through the narrow passage into the valley. A deep gorge, it was, with the black sheer cliffs on either side pressing close. Ten feet forward, I stopped short, staring in amazement. Advancing toward me like a column of infantry came a long line of Larynx miners. They walked slowly, looking straight ahead, moving down the center of the gorge toward the entrance. But there was more! A kite car was drawn up to the side. The windscreen had been removed, and mounted on the hood was a large bullet-like contrivance that looked not unlike a search lamp. A blinding shaft of bluish radiance spewed from its open end. Playing it back and forth upon the marching men were Jimmy Baker and Xartal, the Martian. "Ultra violet," Grannie Annie explained. "The opposite end of the vibratory scale and the only thing that will combat the infra-red rays that cause red spot fever. Those men won't stop walking until they've reached Shaft Four." Grannie Annie told her story during the long ride back to Shaft Four. We drove slowly, keeping the line of marching Larynx miners always ahead of us. Jimmy Baker had struck a new big lode of Acoustix, a lode which if worked successfully would see Larynx Incorporated become a far more powerful exporting concern than Interstellar Voice . Antlers Park didn't want that. It was he or his agents who placed those lens buttons in the Larynx barracks. For he knew that just as Jupiter's great spot was responsible for a climate and atmosphere suitable for an Earthman on this Eighth Moon, so also was that spot a deadly power in itself, capable when its rays were concentrated of causing a fatal sickness. Then suddenly becoming fearful of Grannie's prying, Antlers Park strove to head her off before she reached Shaft Four. He did head her off and managed to lure her and Baker and Xartal into the Shaft barracks where they would be exposed to the rays from the lens button. But Grannie only pretended to contract the plague. Park then attempted to outwit Ezra Karn and me by returning in Jimmy Baker's kite car with a cockatoo image of Grannie. I listened to all this in silence. "But," I said when she had finished, "how did Park manage to have that image created and why did the mine laborers walk out into the Baldric when they contracted the fever?" Grannie Annie frowned. "I'm not sure I can answer the first of those questions," she replied. "You must remember Antlers Park has been on this moon five years and during that time he must have acquainted himself with many of its secrets. Probably he learned long ago just what to do to make a cockatoo create a mental image. "As for the men going out into the Baldric, that was more of Park's diabolical work. In the walls of the barracks besides those lens buttons were also miniature electro-hypnotic plates, with the master controlling unit located in that valley. Park knew that when the miners were in a drugged condition from the effects of the fever they would be susceptible to the machine's lure.... And now, Billy-boy, are you coming with me?" "Coming with you?" I repeated. "Where?" The old lady lit a cigarette. "Pluto maybe," she said. "There's a penal colony there, you know, and that ought to tie in nicely with a new crime story. I can see it now ... prison break, stolen rocket ship, fugitives lurking in the interplanetary lanes...." "Grannie," I laughed. "You're incorrigible!"

What is the importance of Acoustix in the story?

1

Acoustix is the ore that Larynx Incorporated and Interstellar Voice are both harvesting and selling. As far as anyone knows, Acoustix can only be found on this moon of Jupiter's. The ore is useless on Earth, but Martians use it to continue to communicate with Earthmen after they have reached old age. Martians create wave lengths with their thoughts using vibrations. After they become older, they are unable to create the same frequency of vibrations, and therefore lose the ability to speak with others. The Acoustix ore revitalizes the organ they use to create the vibrations, and it gives them the gift of communication once more. Antlers Park does not want Jimmy Baker and his company to outdo his business, Interstellar Voice. The men share access to the Baldric, which is where the miners are harvesting Acoustix. If Park can get Baker out of the way, he will have the whole stretch of land to harvest for himself, and he will be the sole person profiting off of the moon. He hatches a plan to make Baker's employees sick with Red Spot Fever so that they walk off the job and leave the Acoustix to his miners to gather and sell.

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Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net DOUBLE TROUBLE by CARL JACOBI Grannie Annie, that waspish science-fiction writer, was in a jam again. What with red-spot fever, talking cockatoos and flagpole trees, I was running in circles—especially since Grannie became twins every now and then. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] We had left the offices of Interstellar Voice three days ago, Earth time, and now as the immense disc of Jupiter flamed across the sky, entered the outer limits of the Baldric. Grannie Annie strode in the lead, her absurd long-skirted black dress looking as out of place in this desert as the trees. Flagpole trees. They rose straight up like enormous cat-tails, with only a melon-shaped protuberance at the top to show they were a form of vegetation. Everything else was blanketed by the sand and the powerful wind that blew from all quarters. As we reached the first of those trees, Grannie came to a halt. "This is the Baldric all right. If my calculations are right, we've hit it at its narrowest spot." Ezra Karn took a greasy pipe from his lips and spat. "It looks like the rest of this God-forsaken moon," he said, "'ceptin for them sticks." Xartal, the Martian illustrator, said nothing. He was like that, taciturn, speaking only when spoken to. He could be excused this time, however, for this was only our third day on Jupiter's Eighth Moon, and the country was still strange to us. When Annabella C. Flowers, that renowned writer of science fiction, visiphoned me at Crater City, Mars, to meet her here, I had thought she was crazy. But Miss Flowers, known to her friends as Grannie Annie, had always been mildly crazy. If you haven't read her books, you've missed something. She's the author of Lady of the Green Flames , Lady of the Runaway Planet , Lady of the Crimson Space-Beast , and other works of science fiction. Blood-and-thunder as these books are, however, they have one redeeming feature—authenticity of background. Grannie Annie was the original research digger-upper, and when she laid the setting of a yarn on a star of the sixth magnitude, only a transportation-velocity of less than light could prevent her from visiting her "stage" in person. Therefore when she asked me to meet her at the landing field of Interstellar Voice on Jupiter's Eighth Moon, I knew she had another novel in the state of embryo. What I didn't expect was Ezra Karn. He was an old prospector Grannie had met, and he had become so attached to the authoress he now followed her wherever she went. As for Xartal, he was a Martian and was slated to do the illustrations for Grannie's new book. Five minutes after my ship had blasted down, the four of us met in the offices of Interstellar Voice . And then I was shaking hands with Antlers Park, the manager of I. V. himself. "Glad to meet you," he said cordially. "I've just been trying to persuade Miss Flowers not to attempt a trip into the Baldric." "What's the Baldric?" I had asked. Antlers Park flicked the ash from his cheroot and shrugged. "Will you believe me, sir," he said, "when I tell you I've been out here on this forsaken moon five years and don't rightly know myself?" I scowled at that; it didn't make sense. "However, as you perhaps know, the only reason for colonial activities here at all is because of the presence of an ore known as Acoustix. It's no use to the people of Earth but of untold value on Mars. I'm not up on the scientific reasons, but it seems that life on the red planet has developed with a supersonic method of vocal communication. The Martian speaks as the Earthman does, but he amplifies his thoughts' transmission by way of wave lengths as high as three million vibrations per second. The trouble is that by the time the average Martian reaches middle age, his ability to produce those vibrations steadily decreases. Then it was found that this ore, Acoustix, revitalized their sounding apparatus, and the rush was on." "What do you mean?" Park leaned back. "The rush to find more of the ore," he explained. "But up until now this moon is the only place where it can be found. "There are two companies here," he continued, " Interstellar Voice and Larynx Incorporated . Chap by the name of Jimmy Baker runs that. However, the point is, between the properties of these two companies stretches a band or belt which has become known as the Baldric. "There are two principal forms of life in the Baldric; flagpole trees and a species of ornithoid resembling cockatoos. So far no one has crossed the Baldric without trouble." "What sort of trouble?" Grannie Annie had demanded. And when Antlers Park stuttered evasively, the old lady snorted, "Fiddlesticks, I never saw trouble yet that couldn't be explained. We leave in an hour." So now here we were at the outer reaches of the Baldric, four travelers on foot with only the barest necessities in the way of equipment and supplies. I walked forward to get a closer view of one of the flagpole trees. And then abruptly I saw something else. A queer-looking bird squatted there in the sand, looking up at me. Silver in plumage, it resembled a parrot with a crest; and yet it didn't. In some strange way the thing was a hideous caricature. "Look what I found," I yelled. "What I found," said the cockatoo in a very human voice. "Thunder, it talks," I said amazed. "Talks," repeated the bird, blinking its eyes. The cockatoo repeated my last statement again, then rose on its short legs, flapped its wings once and soared off into the sky. Xartal, the Martian illustrator, already had a notebook in his hands and was sketching a likeness of the creature. Ten minutes later we were on the move again. We saw more silver cockatoos and more flagpole trees. Above us, the great disc of Jupiter began to descend toward the horizon. And then all at once Grannie stopped again, this time at the top of a high ridge. She shielded her eyes and stared off into the plain we had just crossed. "Billy-boy," she said to me in a strange voice, "look down there and tell me what you see." I followed the direction of her hand and a shock went through me from head to foot. Down there, slowly toiling across the sand, advanced a party of four persons. In the lead was a little old lady in a black dress. Behind her strode a grizzled Earth man in a flop-brimmed hat, another Earth man, and a Martian. Detail for detail they were a duplicate of ourselves! "A mirage!" said Ezra Karn. But it wasn't a mirage. As the party came closer, we could see that their lips were moving, and their voices became audible. I listened in awe. The duplicate of myself was talking to the duplicate of Grannie Annie, and she was replying in the most natural way. Steadily the four travelers approached. Then, when a dozen yards away, they suddenly faded like a negative exposed to light and disappeared. "What do you make of it?" I said in a hushed voice. Grannie shook her head. "Might be a form of mass hypnosis superinduced by some chemical radiations," she replied. "Whatever it is, we'd better watch our step. There's no telling what might lie ahead." We walked after that with taut nerves and watchful eyes, but we saw no repetition of the "mirage." The wind continued to blow ceaselessly, and the sand seemed to grow more and more powdery. For some time I had fixed my gaze on a dot in the sky which I supposed to be a high-flying cockatoo. As that dot continued to move across the heavens in a single direction, I called Grannie's attention to it. "It's a kite," she nodded. "There should be a car attached to it somewhere." She offered no further explanation, but a quarter of an hour later as we topped another rise a curious elliptical car with a long slanting windscreen came into view. Attached to its hood was a taut wire which slanted up into the sky to connect with the kite. A man was driving and when he saw us, he waved. Five minutes later Grannie was shaking his hand vigorously and mumbling introductions. "This is Jimmy Baker," she said. "He manages Larynx Incorporated , and he's the real reason we're here." I decided I liked Baker the moment I saw him. In his middle thirties, he was tall and lean, with pleasant blue eyes which even his sand goggles could not conceal. "I can't tell you how glad I am you're here, Grannie," he said. "If anybody can help me, you can." Grannie's eyes glittered. "Trouble with the mine laborers?" she questioned. Jimmy Baker nodded. He told his story over the roar of the wind as we headed back across the desert. Occasionally he touched a stud on an electric windlass to which the kite wire was attached. Apparently these adjustments moved planes or fins on the kite and accounted for the car's ability to move in any direction. "If I weren't a realist, I'd say that Larynx Incorporated has been bewitched," he began slowly. "We pay our men high wages and give them excellent living conditions with a vacation on Callisto every year. Up until a short time ago most of them were in excellent health and spirits. Then the Red Spot Fever got them." "Red Spot Fever?" Grannie looked at him curiously. Jimmy Baker nodded. "The first symptoms are a tendency to garrulousness on the part of the patient. Then they disappear." He paused to make an adjustment of the windlass. "They walk out into the Baldric," he continued, "and nothing can stop them. We tried following them, of course, but it was no go. As soon as they realize they're being followed, they stop. But the moment our eyes are turned, they give us the slip." "But surely you must have some idea of where they go," Grannie said. Baker lit a cigarette. "There's all kinds of rumors," he replied, "but none of them will hold water. By the way, there's a cockatoo eyrie ahead of us." I followed his gaze and saw a curious structure suspended between a rude circle of flagpole trees. A strange web-like formation of translucent gauzy material, it was. Fully two hundred cockatoos were perched upon it. They watched us with their mild eyes as we passed, but they didn't move. After that we were rolling up the driveway that led to the offices of Larynx Incorporated . As Jimmy Baker led the way up the inclined ramp, a door in the central building opened, and a man emerged. His face was drawn. "Mr. Baker," he said breathlessly, "seventy-five workers at Shaft Four have headed out into the Baldric." Baker dropped his cigarette and ground his heel on it savagely. "Shaft Four, eh?" he repeated. "That's our principal mine. If the fever spreads there, I'm licked." He motioned us into his office and strode across to a desk. Silent Xartal, the Martian illustrator, took a chair in a corner and got his notebook out, sketching the room's interior. Grannie Annie remained standing. Presently the old lady walked across to the desk and helped herself to the bottle of Martian whiskey there. "There must be ways of stopping this," she said. "Have you called in any physicians? Why don't you call an enforced vacation and send the men away until the plague has died down?" Baker shook his head. "Three doctors from Callisto were here last month. They were as much at loss as I am. As for sending the men away, I may have to do that, but when I do, it means quits. Our company is chartered with Spacolonial, and you know what that means. Failure to produce during a period of thirty days or more, and you lose all rights." A visiphone bell sounded, and Baker walked across to the instrument. A man's face formed in the vision plate. Baker listened, said "Okay" and threw off the switch. "The entire crew of Shaft Four have gone out into the Baldric," he said slowly. There was a large map hanging on the wall back of Baker's desk. Grannie Annie walked across to it and began to study its markings. "Shaft Four is at the outer edge of the Baldric at a point where that corridor is at its widest," she said. Baker looked up. "That's right. We only began operations there a comparatively short time ago. Struck a rich vein of Acoustix that runs deep in. If that vein holds out, we'll double the output of Interstellar Voice , our rival, in a year." Grannie nodded. "I think you and I and Xartal had better take a run up there," she said. "But first I want to see your laboratory." There was no refusing her. Jimmy Baker led the way down to a lower level where a huge laboratory and experimental shop ran the length of the building. Grannie seized a light weight carry-case and began dropping articles into it. A pontocated glass lens, three or four Wellington radite bulbs, each with a spectroscopic filament, a small dynamo that would operate on a kite windlass, and a quantity of wire and other items. The kite car was brought out again, and the old woman, Baker and the Martian took their places in it. Then Jimmy waved, and the car began to roll down the ramp. Not until they had vanished in the desert haze did I sense the loneliness of this outpost. With that loneliness came a sudden sense of foreboding. Had I been a fool to let Grannie go? I thought of her, an old woman who should be in a rocking chair, knitting socks. If anything happened to Annabella C. Flowers, I would never forgive myself and neither would her millions of readers. Ezra Karn and I went back into the office. The old prospector chuckled. "Dang human dynamo. Got more energy than a runaway comet." A connecting door on the far side of the office opened onto a long corridor which ended at a staircase. "Let's look around," I said. We passed down the corridor and climbed the staircase to the second floor. Here were the general offices of Larynx Incorporated , and through glass doors I could see clerks busy with counting machines and report tapes. In another chamber the extremely light Acoustix ore was being packed into big cases and marked for shipment. At the far end a door to a small room stood open. Inside a young man was tilted back in a swivel chair before a complicated instrument panel. "C'mon in," he said, seeing us. "If you want a look at your friends, here they are." He flicked a stud, and the entire wall above the panel underwent a slow change of colors. Those colors whirled kaleidescopically, then coalesced into a three-dimensional scene. It was a scene of a rapidly unfolding desert country as seen from the rear of a kite car. Directly behind the windscreen, backs turned to me, were Jimmy Baker, Grannie, and Xartal. It was as if I were standing directly behind them. "It's Mr. Baker's own invention," the operator said. "An improvement on the visiphone." "Do you mean to say you can follow the movements of that car and its passengers wherever it goes? Can you hear them talk too?" "Sure." The operator turned another dial, and Grannie's falsetto voice entered the room. It stopped abruptly. "The machine uses a lot of power," the operator said, "and as yet we haven't got much." The cloud of anxiety which had wrapped itself about me disappeared somewhat as I viewed this device. At least I could now keep myself posted of Grannie's movements. Karn and I went down to the commissary where we ate our supper. When we returned to Jimmy Baker's office, the visiphone bell was ringing. I went over to it and turned it on, and to my surprise the face of Antlers Park flashed on the screen. "Hello," he said in his friendly way. "I see you arrived all right. Is Miss Flowers there?" "Miss Flowers left with Mr. Baker for Shaft Four," I said. "There's trouble up there. Red spot fever." "Fever, eh?" repeated Park. "That's a shame. Is there anything I can do?" "Tell me," I said, "has your company had any trouble with this plague?" "A little. But up until yesterday the fever's been confined to the other side of the Baldric. We had one partial case, but my chemists gave the chap an antitoxin that seems to have worked. Come to think of it, I might drive over to Shaft Four and give Jimmy Baker the formula. I haven't been out in the Baldric for years, but if you didn't have any trouble, I shouldn't either." We exchanged a few more pleasantries, and then he rang off. In exactly an hour I went upstairs to the visiscreen room. Then once more I was directly behind my friends, listening in on their conversation. The view through the windscreen showed an irregular array of flagpole trees, with the sky dotted by high-flying cockatoos. "There's an eyrie over there," Jimmy Baker was saying. "We might as well camp beside it." Moments later a rude circle of flagpole trees loomed ahead. Across the top of them was stretched a translucent web. Jimmy and Grannie got out of the car and began making camp. Xartal remained in his seat. He was drawing pictures on large pieces of pasteboard, and as I stood there in the visiscreen room, I watched him. There was no doubt about it, the Martian was clever. He would make a few rapid lines on one of the pasteboards, rub it a little to get the proper shading and then go on to the next. In swift rotation likenesses of Ezra Karn, of myself, of Jimmy Baker, and of Antlers Park took form. Ezra spoke over my shoulder. "He's doing scenes for Grannie's new book," he said. "The old lady figures on using the events here for a plot. Look at that damned nosy bird! " A silver cockatoo had alighted on the kite car and was surveying curiously Xartal's work. As each drawing was completed, the bird scanned it with rapt attention. Abruptly it flew to the top of the eyrie, where it seemed to be having a consultation with its bird companions. And then abruptly it happened. The cockatoos took off in mass flight. A group of Earth people suddenly materialized on the eyrie, talking and moving about as if it were the most natural thing in the world. With a shock I saw the likeness of myself; I saw Ezra Karn; and I saw the image of Jimmy Baker. The real Jimmy Baker stood next to Grannie, staring up at this incredible mirage. Grannie let out a whoop. "I've got it!" she said. "Those things we see up there are nothing more than mental images. They're Xartal's drawings!" "Don't you see," the lady continued. "Everything that Xartal put on paper has been seen by one or more of these cockatoos. The cockatoos are like Earth parrots all right, but not only have they the power of copying speech, they also have the ability to recreate a mental image of what they have seen. In other words their brains form a powerful photographic impression of the object. That impression is then transmitted simultaneously in telepathic wavelengths to common foci. That eyrie might be likened to a cinema screen, receiving brain vibrations from a hundred different sources that blend into the light field to form what are apparently three-dimensional images." The Larynx manager nodded slowly. "I see," he said. "But why don't the birds reconstruct images from the actual person. Why use drawings?" "Probably because the drawings are exaggerated in certain details and made a greater impression on their brains," Grannie replied. Up on the eyrie a strange performance was taking place. The duplicate of Grannie Annie was bowing to the duplicate of Jimmy Baker, and the image of Ezra Karn was playing leap frog with the image of Antlers Park. Then abruptly the screen before me blurred and went blank. "Sorry," the operator said. "I've used too much power already. Have to give the generators a chance to build it up again." Nodding, I turned and motioned to Karn. We went back downstairs. "That explains something at any rate," the old prospector said. "But how about that Red spot fever?" On Jimmy Baker's desk was a large file marked: FEVER VICTIMS. I opened it and found it contained the case histories of those men who had been attacked by the strange malady. Reading them over, I was struck by one detail. Each patient had received the first symptoms, not while working in the mines, but while sleeping or lounging in the barracks. Five minutes later Karn and I were striding down a white ramp that led to the nearest barracks. The building came into sight, a low rectangular structure, dome-roofed to withstand the violent winds. Inside double tiers of bunks stretched along either wall. In those bunks some thirty men lay sleeping. The far wall was taken up by a huge window of denvo-quartz. As I stood there, something suddenly caught Ezra Karn's eye. He began to walk toward that window. "Look here," he said. Six feet up on that window a small almost imperceptible button of dull metal had been wedged into an aperture cut in the quartz. The central part of the button appeared to be a powerful lens of some kind, and as I seized it and pulled it loose, I felt the hum of tiny clock work. All at once I had it! Red spot fever. Heat fever from the infra-red rays of Jupiter's great spot. Someone had constructed this lens to concentrate and amplify the power of those rays. The internal clockwork served a double purpose. It opened a shutter, and it rotated the lens slowly so that it played for a time on each of the sleeping men. I slid the metal button in my pocket and left the barracks at a run. Back in the visiscreen room, I snapped to the operator: "Turn it on!" The kite car swam into view in the screen above the instrument panel. I stared with open eyes. Jimmy Baker no longer was in the car, nor was Xartal, the Martian. Grannie Annie was there, but seated at the controls was Antlers Park, the manager of Interstellar Voice. Ezra Karn jabbed my elbow. "Grannie's coming back. I thought she'd be getting sick of this blamed moon." It didn't make sense. In all the years I'd known Annabella C. Flowers, never yet had I seen her desert a case until she had woven the clues and facts to a logical conclusion. "Ezra," I said, "we're going to drive out and meet them. There's something screwy here." Ten minutes later in another kite car we were driving at a fast clip through the powdery sands of the Baldric. And before long we saw another car approaching. It was Grannie. As the car drew up alongside I saw her sitting in her prim way next to Antlers Park. Park said: "We left the others at the mine. Miss Flowers is going back with me to my offices to help me improve the formula for that new antitoxin." He waved his hand, and the car moved off. I watched it as it sped across the desert, and a growing suspicion began to form in my mind. Then, like a knife thrust, the truth struck me. "Ezra!" I yelled, swinging the car. "That wasn't Grannie! That was one of those damned cockatoo images. We've got to catch him." The other car was some distance ahead now. Park looked back and saw us following. He did something to the kite wire, and his car leaped ahead. I threw the speed indicator hard over. Our kite was a huge box affair with a steady powerful pull to the connecting wire. Park's vehicle was drawn by a flat triangular kite that dove and fluttered with each variance of the wind. Steadily we began to close in. The manager of Interstellar Voice turned again, and something glinted in his hand. There was a flash of purple flame, and a round hole appeared in our windscreen inches above Karn's head. "Heat gun!" Ezra yelled. Now we were rocketing over the sand dunes, winding in and out between the flagpole trees. I had to catch that car I told myself. Grannie Annie's very life might be at stake, not to mention the lives of hundreds of mine workers. Again Park took aim and again a hole shattered our windscreen. The wind shifted and blew from another quarter. The box kite soared, but the triangular kite faltered. Taking advantage of Park's loss of speed, I raced alongside. The I. V. manager lifted his weapon frantically. But before he could use it a third time, Ezra Karn had whipped a lariat from his belt and sent it coiling across the intervening space. The thong yanked tight about the manager's throat. Park did the only thing he could do. He shut off power, and the two cars coasted to a halt. Then I was across in the other seat, wrenching the weapon free from his grasp. "What have you done with Miss Flowers?" I demanded. The manager's eyes glittered with fear as he saw my finger tense on the trigger. Weakly he lifted an arm and pointed to the northwest. "Val-ley. Thir-ty miles. Entrance hidden by wall of ... flagpole trees." I leaped into the driver's seat and gave the kite its head. And now the country began to undergo a subtle change. The trees seemed to group themselves in a long flanking corridor in a northwesterly direction, as if to hide some secret that lay beyond. Twice I attempted to penetrate that wall, only to find my way blocked by those curious growths. Then a corridor opened before me; a mile forward and the desert began again. But it was a new desert this time: the sand packed hard as granite, the way ahead utterly devoid of vegetation. In the distance black bulging hills extended to right and left, with a narrow chasm or doorway between. I headed for that entrance, and when I reached it, I shut off power with an exclamation of astonishment. There was a huge chair-shaped rock there, and seated upon it was Grannie Annie. She had a tablet in her hands, and she was writing. "Grannie!" I yelled. "What're you doing here? Where's Mr. Baker?" She rose to her feet and clambered down the rock. "Getting back Jimmy's mine laborers," she said, a twinkle in her eyes. "I see you've got Antlers Park. I'm glad of that. It saves me a lot of trouble." She took off her spectacles and wiped them on her sleeve. "Don't look so fuddled, Billy-boy. Come along, and I'll show you." She led the way through the narrow passage into the valley. A deep gorge, it was, with the black sheer cliffs on either side pressing close. Ten feet forward, I stopped short, staring in amazement. Advancing toward me like a column of infantry came a long line of Larynx miners. They walked slowly, looking straight ahead, moving down the center of the gorge toward the entrance. But there was more! A kite car was drawn up to the side. The windscreen had been removed, and mounted on the hood was a large bullet-like contrivance that looked not unlike a search lamp. A blinding shaft of bluish radiance spewed from its open end. Playing it back and forth upon the marching men were Jimmy Baker and Xartal, the Martian. "Ultra violet," Grannie Annie explained. "The opposite end of the vibratory scale and the only thing that will combat the infra-red rays that cause red spot fever. Those men won't stop walking until they've reached Shaft Four." Grannie Annie told her story during the long ride back to Shaft Four. We drove slowly, keeping the line of marching Larynx miners always ahead of us. Jimmy Baker had struck a new big lode of Acoustix, a lode which if worked successfully would see Larynx Incorporated become a far more powerful exporting concern than Interstellar Voice . Antlers Park didn't want that. It was he or his agents who placed those lens buttons in the Larynx barracks. For he knew that just as Jupiter's great spot was responsible for a climate and atmosphere suitable for an Earthman on this Eighth Moon, so also was that spot a deadly power in itself, capable when its rays were concentrated of causing a fatal sickness. Then suddenly becoming fearful of Grannie's prying, Antlers Park strove to head her off before she reached Shaft Four. He did head her off and managed to lure her and Baker and Xartal into the Shaft barracks where they would be exposed to the rays from the lens button. But Grannie only pretended to contract the plague. Park then attempted to outwit Ezra Karn and me by returning in Jimmy Baker's kite car with a cockatoo image of Grannie. I listened to all this in silence. "But," I said when she had finished, "how did Park manage to have that image created and why did the mine laborers walk out into the Baldric when they contracted the fever?" Grannie Annie frowned. "I'm not sure I can answer the first of those questions," she replied. "You must remember Antlers Park has been on this moon five years and during that time he must have acquainted himself with many of its secrets. Probably he learned long ago just what to do to make a cockatoo create a mental image. "As for the men going out into the Baldric, that was more of Park's diabolical work. In the walls of the barracks besides those lens buttons were also miniature electro-hypnotic plates, with the master controlling unit located in that valley. Park knew that when the miners were in a drugged condition from the effects of the fever they would be susceptible to the machine's lure.... And now, Billy-boy, are you coming with me?" "Coming with you?" I repeated. "Where?" The old lady lit a cigarette. "Pluto maybe," she said. "There's a penal colony there, you know, and that ought to tie in nicely with a new crime story. I can see it now ... prison break, stolen rocket ship, fugitives lurking in the interplanetary lanes...." "Grannie," I laughed. "You're incorrigible!"

What is Red Spot Fever?

10

The symptoms of the fever are described as “garrulousness” followed by the victims leaving their post and walking into the Baldric desert. The fever is brought on by infra-red rays from Jupiter’s great spot. Normally, people on this moon aren’t coming down with the fever from their regular activities. However, a lens-like device mounted in the window of the worker barracks at Larynx Incorporated projects the infra-red rays from the great spot around the room onto the sleeping workers which puts them into this trance-like state. Antlers Karn is responsible for causing the Red Spot Fever by having the devices installed in his competitors' barracks. He also claims to have developed an antitoxin that would reverse the fever, however, it is implied that this was only a lie to cover up his actions.

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Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net DOUBLE TROUBLE by CARL JACOBI Grannie Annie, that waspish science-fiction writer, was in a jam again. What with red-spot fever, talking cockatoos and flagpole trees, I was running in circles—especially since Grannie became twins every now and then. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] We had left the offices of Interstellar Voice three days ago, Earth time, and now as the immense disc of Jupiter flamed across the sky, entered the outer limits of the Baldric. Grannie Annie strode in the lead, her absurd long-skirted black dress looking as out of place in this desert as the trees. Flagpole trees. They rose straight up like enormous cat-tails, with only a melon-shaped protuberance at the top to show they were a form of vegetation. Everything else was blanketed by the sand and the powerful wind that blew from all quarters. As we reached the first of those trees, Grannie came to a halt. "This is the Baldric all right. If my calculations are right, we've hit it at its narrowest spot." Ezra Karn took a greasy pipe from his lips and spat. "It looks like the rest of this God-forsaken moon," he said, "'ceptin for them sticks." Xartal, the Martian illustrator, said nothing. He was like that, taciturn, speaking only when spoken to. He could be excused this time, however, for this was only our third day on Jupiter's Eighth Moon, and the country was still strange to us. When Annabella C. Flowers, that renowned writer of science fiction, visiphoned me at Crater City, Mars, to meet her here, I had thought she was crazy. But Miss Flowers, known to her friends as Grannie Annie, had always been mildly crazy. If you haven't read her books, you've missed something. She's the author of Lady of the Green Flames , Lady of the Runaway Planet , Lady of the Crimson Space-Beast , and other works of science fiction. Blood-and-thunder as these books are, however, they have one redeeming feature—authenticity of background. Grannie Annie was the original research digger-upper, and when she laid the setting of a yarn on a star of the sixth magnitude, only a transportation-velocity of less than light could prevent her from visiting her "stage" in person. Therefore when she asked me to meet her at the landing field of Interstellar Voice on Jupiter's Eighth Moon, I knew she had another novel in the state of embryo. What I didn't expect was Ezra Karn. He was an old prospector Grannie had met, and he had become so attached to the authoress he now followed her wherever she went. As for Xartal, he was a Martian and was slated to do the illustrations for Grannie's new book. Five minutes after my ship had blasted down, the four of us met in the offices of Interstellar Voice . And then I was shaking hands with Antlers Park, the manager of I. V. himself. "Glad to meet you," he said cordially. "I've just been trying to persuade Miss Flowers not to attempt a trip into the Baldric." "What's the Baldric?" I had asked. Antlers Park flicked the ash from his cheroot and shrugged. "Will you believe me, sir," he said, "when I tell you I've been out here on this forsaken moon five years and don't rightly know myself?" I scowled at that; it didn't make sense. "However, as you perhaps know, the only reason for colonial activities here at all is because of the presence of an ore known as Acoustix. It's no use to the people of Earth but of untold value on Mars. I'm not up on the scientific reasons, but it seems that life on the red planet has developed with a supersonic method of vocal communication. The Martian speaks as the Earthman does, but he amplifies his thoughts' transmission by way of wave lengths as high as three million vibrations per second. The trouble is that by the time the average Martian reaches middle age, his ability to produce those vibrations steadily decreases. Then it was found that this ore, Acoustix, revitalized their sounding apparatus, and the rush was on." "What do you mean?" Park leaned back. "The rush to find more of the ore," he explained. "But up until now this moon is the only place where it can be found. "There are two companies here," he continued, " Interstellar Voice and Larynx Incorporated . Chap by the name of Jimmy Baker runs that. However, the point is, between the properties of these two companies stretches a band or belt which has become known as the Baldric. "There are two principal forms of life in the Baldric; flagpole trees and a species of ornithoid resembling cockatoos. So far no one has crossed the Baldric without trouble." "What sort of trouble?" Grannie Annie had demanded. And when Antlers Park stuttered evasively, the old lady snorted, "Fiddlesticks, I never saw trouble yet that couldn't be explained. We leave in an hour." So now here we were at the outer reaches of the Baldric, four travelers on foot with only the barest necessities in the way of equipment and supplies. I walked forward to get a closer view of one of the flagpole trees. And then abruptly I saw something else. A queer-looking bird squatted there in the sand, looking up at me. Silver in plumage, it resembled a parrot with a crest; and yet it didn't. In some strange way the thing was a hideous caricature. "Look what I found," I yelled. "What I found," said the cockatoo in a very human voice. "Thunder, it talks," I said amazed. "Talks," repeated the bird, blinking its eyes. The cockatoo repeated my last statement again, then rose on its short legs, flapped its wings once and soared off into the sky. Xartal, the Martian illustrator, already had a notebook in his hands and was sketching a likeness of the creature. Ten minutes later we were on the move again. We saw more silver cockatoos and more flagpole trees. Above us, the great disc of Jupiter began to descend toward the horizon. And then all at once Grannie stopped again, this time at the top of a high ridge. She shielded her eyes and stared off into the plain we had just crossed. "Billy-boy," she said to me in a strange voice, "look down there and tell me what you see." I followed the direction of her hand and a shock went through me from head to foot. Down there, slowly toiling across the sand, advanced a party of four persons. In the lead was a little old lady in a black dress. Behind her strode a grizzled Earth man in a flop-brimmed hat, another Earth man, and a Martian. Detail for detail they were a duplicate of ourselves! "A mirage!" said Ezra Karn. But it wasn't a mirage. As the party came closer, we could see that their lips were moving, and their voices became audible. I listened in awe. The duplicate of myself was talking to the duplicate of Grannie Annie, and she was replying in the most natural way. Steadily the four travelers approached. Then, when a dozen yards away, they suddenly faded like a negative exposed to light and disappeared. "What do you make of it?" I said in a hushed voice. Grannie shook her head. "Might be a form of mass hypnosis superinduced by some chemical radiations," she replied. "Whatever it is, we'd better watch our step. There's no telling what might lie ahead." We walked after that with taut nerves and watchful eyes, but we saw no repetition of the "mirage." The wind continued to blow ceaselessly, and the sand seemed to grow more and more powdery. For some time I had fixed my gaze on a dot in the sky which I supposed to be a high-flying cockatoo. As that dot continued to move across the heavens in a single direction, I called Grannie's attention to it. "It's a kite," she nodded. "There should be a car attached to it somewhere." She offered no further explanation, but a quarter of an hour later as we topped another rise a curious elliptical car with a long slanting windscreen came into view. Attached to its hood was a taut wire which slanted up into the sky to connect with the kite. A man was driving and when he saw us, he waved. Five minutes later Grannie was shaking his hand vigorously and mumbling introductions. "This is Jimmy Baker," she said. "He manages Larynx Incorporated , and he's the real reason we're here." I decided I liked Baker the moment I saw him. In his middle thirties, he was tall and lean, with pleasant blue eyes which even his sand goggles could not conceal. "I can't tell you how glad I am you're here, Grannie," he said. "If anybody can help me, you can." Grannie's eyes glittered. "Trouble with the mine laborers?" she questioned. Jimmy Baker nodded. He told his story over the roar of the wind as we headed back across the desert. Occasionally he touched a stud on an electric windlass to which the kite wire was attached. Apparently these adjustments moved planes or fins on the kite and accounted for the car's ability to move in any direction. "If I weren't a realist, I'd say that Larynx Incorporated has been bewitched," he began slowly. "We pay our men high wages and give them excellent living conditions with a vacation on Callisto every year. Up until a short time ago most of them were in excellent health and spirits. Then the Red Spot Fever got them." "Red Spot Fever?" Grannie looked at him curiously. Jimmy Baker nodded. "The first symptoms are a tendency to garrulousness on the part of the patient. Then they disappear." He paused to make an adjustment of the windlass. "They walk out into the Baldric," he continued, "and nothing can stop them. We tried following them, of course, but it was no go. As soon as they realize they're being followed, they stop. But the moment our eyes are turned, they give us the slip." "But surely you must have some idea of where they go," Grannie said. Baker lit a cigarette. "There's all kinds of rumors," he replied, "but none of them will hold water. By the way, there's a cockatoo eyrie ahead of us." I followed his gaze and saw a curious structure suspended between a rude circle of flagpole trees. A strange web-like formation of translucent gauzy material, it was. Fully two hundred cockatoos were perched upon it. They watched us with their mild eyes as we passed, but they didn't move. After that we were rolling up the driveway that led to the offices of Larynx Incorporated . As Jimmy Baker led the way up the inclined ramp, a door in the central building opened, and a man emerged. His face was drawn. "Mr. Baker," he said breathlessly, "seventy-five workers at Shaft Four have headed out into the Baldric." Baker dropped his cigarette and ground his heel on it savagely. "Shaft Four, eh?" he repeated. "That's our principal mine. If the fever spreads there, I'm licked." He motioned us into his office and strode across to a desk. Silent Xartal, the Martian illustrator, took a chair in a corner and got his notebook out, sketching the room's interior. Grannie Annie remained standing. Presently the old lady walked across to the desk and helped herself to the bottle of Martian whiskey there. "There must be ways of stopping this," she said. "Have you called in any physicians? Why don't you call an enforced vacation and send the men away until the plague has died down?" Baker shook his head. "Three doctors from Callisto were here last month. They were as much at loss as I am. As for sending the men away, I may have to do that, but when I do, it means quits. Our company is chartered with Spacolonial, and you know what that means. Failure to produce during a period of thirty days or more, and you lose all rights." A visiphone bell sounded, and Baker walked across to the instrument. A man's face formed in the vision plate. Baker listened, said "Okay" and threw off the switch. "The entire crew of Shaft Four have gone out into the Baldric," he said slowly. There was a large map hanging on the wall back of Baker's desk. Grannie Annie walked across to it and began to study its markings. "Shaft Four is at the outer edge of the Baldric at a point where that corridor is at its widest," she said. Baker looked up. "That's right. We only began operations there a comparatively short time ago. Struck a rich vein of Acoustix that runs deep in. If that vein holds out, we'll double the output of Interstellar Voice , our rival, in a year." Grannie nodded. "I think you and I and Xartal had better take a run up there," she said. "But first I want to see your laboratory." There was no refusing her. Jimmy Baker led the way down to a lower level where a huge laboratory and experimental shop ran the length of the building. Grannie seized a light weight carry-case and began dropping articles into it. A pontocated glass lens, three or four Wellington radite bulbs, each with a spectroscopic filament, a small dynamo that would operate on a kite windlass, and a quantity of wire and other items. The kite car was brought out again, and the old woman, Baker and the Martian took their places in it. Then Jimmy waved, and the car began to roll down the ramp. Not until they had vanished in the desert haze did I sense the loneliness of this outpost. With that loneliness came a sudden sense of foreboding. Had I been a fool to let Grannie go? I thought of her, an old woman who should be in a rocking chair, knitting socks. If anything happened to Annabella C. Flowers, I would never forgive myself and neither would her millions of readers. Ezra Karn and I went back into the office. The old prospector chuckled. "Dang human dynamo. Got more energy than a runaway comet." A connecting door on the far side of the office opened onto a long corridor which ended at a staircase. "Let's look around," I said. We passed down the corridor and climbed the staircase to the second floor. Here were the general offices of Larynx Incorporated , and through glass doors I could see clerks busy with counting machines and report tapes. In another chamber the extremely light Acoustix ore was being packed into big cases and marked for shipment. At the far end a door to a small room stood open. Inside a young man was tilted back in a swivel chair before a complicated instrument panel. "C'mon in," he said, seeing us. "If you want a look at your friends, here they are." He flicked a stud, and the entire wall above the panel underwent a slow change of colors. Those colors whirled kaleidescopically, then coalesced into a three-dimensional scene. It was a scene of a rapidly unfolding desert country as seen from the rear of a kite car. Directly behind the windscreen, backs turned to me, were Jimmy Baker, Grannie, and Xartal. It was as if I were standing directly behind them. "It's Mr. Baker's own invention," the operator said. "An improvement on the visiphone." "Do you mean to say you can follow the movements of that car and its passengers wherever it goes? Can you hear them talk too?" "Sure." The operator turned another dial, and Grannie's falsetto voice entered the room. It stopped abruptly. "The machine uses a lot of power," the operator said, "and as yet we haven't got much." The cloud of anxiety which had wrapped itself about me disappeared somewhat as I viewed this device. At least I could now keep myself posted of Grannie's movements. Karn and I went down to the commissary where we ate our supper. When we returned to Jimmy Baker's office, the visiphone bell was ringing. I went over to it and turned it on, and to my surprise the face of Antlers Park flashed on the screen. "Hello," he said in his friendly way. "I see you arrived all right. Is Miss Flowers there?" "Miss Flowers left with Mr. Baker for Shaft Four," I said. "There's trouble up there. Red spot fever." "Fever, eh?" repeated Park. "That's a shame. Is there anything I can do?" "Tell me," I said, "has your company had any trouble with this plague?" "A little. But up until yesterday the fever's been confined to the other side of the Baldric. We had one partial case, but my chemists gave the chap an antitoxin that seems to have worked. Come to think of it, I might drive over to Shaft Four and give Jimmy Baker the formula. I haven't been out in the Baldric for years, but if you didn't have any trouble, I shouldn't either." We exchanged a few more pleasantries, and then he rang off. In exactly an hour I went upstairs to the visiscreen room. Then once more I was directly behind my friends, listening in on their conversation. The view through the windscreen showed an irregular array of flagpole trees, with the sky dotted by high-flying cockatoos. "There's an eyrie over there," Jimmy Baker was saying. "We might as well camp beside it." Moments later a rude circle of flagpole trees loomed ahead. Across the top of them was stretched a translucent web. Jimmy and Grannie got out of the car and began making camp. Xartal remained in his seat. He was drawing pictures on large pieces of pasteboard, and as I stood there in the visiscreen room, I watched him. There was no doubt about it, the Martian was clever. He would make a few rapid lines on one of the pasteboards, rub it a little to get the proper shading and then go on to the next. In swift rotation likenesses of Ezra Karn, of myself, of Jimmy Baker, and of Antlers Park took form. Ezra spoke over my shoulder. "He's doing scenes for Grannie's new book," he said. "The old lady figures on using the events here for a plot. Look at that damned nosy bird! " A silver cockatoo had alighted on the kite car and was surveying curiously Xartal's work. As each drawing was completed, the bird scanned it with rapt attention. Abruptly it flew to the top of the eyrie, where it seemed to be having a consultation with its bird companions. And then abruptly it happened. The cockatoos took off in mass flight. A group of Earth people suddenly materialized on the eyrie, talking and moving about as if it were the most natural thing in the world. With a shock I saw the likeness of myself; I saw Ezra Karn; and I saw the image of Jimmy Baker. The real Jimmy Baker stood next to Grannie, staring up at this incredible mirage. Grannie let out a whoop. "I've got it!" she said. "Those things we see up there are nothing more than mental images. They're Xartal's drawings!" "Don't you see," the lady continued. "Everything that Xartal put on paper has been seen by one or more of these cockatoos. The cockatoos are like Earth parrots all right, but not only have they the power of copying speech, they also have the ability to recreate a mental image of what they have seen. In other words their brains form a powerful photographic impression of the object. That impression is then transmitted simultaneously in telepathic wavelengths to common foci. That eyrie might be likened to a cinema screen, receiving brain vibrations from a hundred different sources that blend into the light field to form what are apparently three-dimensional images." The Larynx manager nodded slowly. "I see," he said. "But why don't the birds reconstruct images from the actual person. Why use drawings?" "Probably because the drawings are exaggerated in certain details and made a greater impression on their brains," Grannie replied. Up on the eyrie a strange performance was taking place. The duplicate of Grannie Annie was bowing to the duplicate of Jimmy Baker, and the image of Ezra Karn was playing leap frog with the image of Antlers Park. Then abruptly the screen before me blurred and went blank. "Sorry," the operator said. "I've used too much power already. Have to give the generators a chance to build it up again." Nodding, I turned and motioned to Karn. We went back downstairs. "That explains something at any rate," the old prospector said. "But how about that Red spot fever?" On Jimmy Baker's desk was a large file marked: FEVER VICTIMS. I opened it and found it contained the case histories of those men who had been attacked by the strange malady. Reading them over, I was struck by one detail. Each patient had received the first symptoms, not while working in the mines, but while sleeping or lounging in the barracks. Five minutes later Karn and I were striding down a white ramp that led to the nearest barracks. The building came into sight, a low rectangular structure, dome-roofed to withstand the violent winds. Inside double tiers of bunks stretched along either wall. In those bunks some thirty men lay sleeping. The far wall was taken up by a huge window of denvo-quartz. As I stood there, something suddenly caught Ezra Karn's eye. He began to walk toward that window. "Look here," he said. Six feet up on that window a small almost imperceptible button of dull metal had been wedged into an aperture cut in the quartz. The central part of the button appeared to be a powerful lens of some kind, and as I seized it and pulled it loose, I felt the hum of tiny clock work. All at once I had it! Red spot fever. Heat fever from the infra-red rays of Jupiter's great spot. Someone had constructed this lens to concentrate and amplify the power of those rays. The internal clockwork served a double purpose. It opened a shutter, and it rotated the lens slowly so that it played for a time on each of the sleeping men. I slid the metal button in my pocket and left the barracks at a run. Back in the visiscreen room, I snapped to the operator: "Turn it on!" The kite car swam into view in the screen above the instrument panel. I stared with open eyes. Jimmy Baker no longer was in the car, nor was Xartal, the Martian. Grannie Annie was there, but seated at the controls was Antlers Park, the manager of Interstellar Voice. Ezra Karn jabbed my elbow. "Grannie's coming back. I thought she'd be getting sick of this blamed moon." It didn't make sense. In all the years I'd known Annabella C. Flowers, never yet had I seen her desert a case until she had woven the clues and facts to a logical conclusion. "Ezra," I said, "we're going to drive out and meet them. There's something screwy here." Ten minutes later in another kite car we were driving at a fast clip through the powdery sands of the Baldric. And before long we saw another car approaching. It was Grannie. As the car drew up alongside I saw her sitting in her prim way next to Antlers Park. Park said: "We left the others at the mine. Miss Flowers is going back with me to my offices to help me improve the formula for that new antitoxin." He waved his hand, and the car moved off. I watched it as it sped across the desert, and a growing suspicion began to form in my mind. Then, like a knife thrust, the truth struck me. "Ezra!" I yelled, swinging the car. "That wasn't Grannie! That was one of those damned cockatoo images. We've got to catch him." The other car was some distance ahead now. Park looked back and saw us following. He did something to the kite wire, and his car leaped ahead. I threw the speed indicator hard over. Our kite was a huge box affair with a steady powerful pull to the connecting wire. Park's vehicle was drawn by a flat triangular kite that dove and fluttered with each variance of the wind. Steadily we began to close in. The manager of Interstellar Voice turned again, and something glinted in his hand. There was a flash of purple flame, and a round hole appeared in our windscreen inches above Karn's head. "Heat gun!" Ezra yelled. Now we were rocketing over the sand dunes, winding in and out between the flagpole trees. I had to catch that car I told myself. Grannie Annie's very life might be at stake, not to mention the lives of hundreds of mine workers. Again Park took aim and again a hole shattered our windscreen. The wind shifted and blew from another quarter. The box kite soared, but the triangular kite faltered. Taking advantage of Park's loss of speed, I raced alongside. The I. V. manager lifted his weapon frantically. But before he could use it a third time, Ezra Karn had whipped a lariat from his belt and sent it coiling across the intervening space. The thong yanked tight about the manager's throat. Park did the only thing he could do. He shut off power, and the two cars coasted to a halt. Then I was across in the other seat, wrenching the weapon free from his grasp. "What have you done with Miss Flowers?" I demanded. The manager's eyes glittered with fear as he saw my finger tense on the trigger. Weakly he lifted an arm and pointed to the northwest. "Val-ley. Thir-ty miles. Entrance hidden by wall of ... flagpole trees." I leaped into the driver's seat and gave the kite its head. And now the country began to undergo a subtle change. The trees seemed to group themselves in a long flanking corridor in a northwesterly direction, as if to hide some secret that lay beyond. Twice I attempted to penetrate that wall, only to find my way blocked by those curious growths. Then a corridor opened before me; a mile forward and the desert began again. But it was a new desert this time: the sand packed hard as granite, the way ahead utterly devoid of vegetation. In the distance black bulging hills extended to right and left, with a narrow chasm or doorway between. I headed for that entrance, and when I reached it, I shut off power with an exclamation of astonishment. There was a huge chair-shaped rock there, and seated upon it was Grannie Annie. She had a tablet in her hands, and she was writing. "Grannie!" I yelled. "What're you doing here? Where's Mr. Baker?" She rose to her feet and clambered down the rock. "Getting back Jimmy's mine laborers," she said, a twinkle in her eyes. "I see you've got Antlers Park. I'm glad of that. It saves me a lot of trouble." She took off her spectacles and wiped them on her sleeve. "Don't look so fuddled, Billy-boy. Come along, and I'll show you." She led the way through the narrow passage into the valley. A deep gorge, it was, with the black sheer cliffs on either side pressing close. Ten feet forward, I stopped short, staring in amazement. Advancing toward me like a column of infantry came a long line of Larynx miners. They walked slowly, looking straight ahead, moving down the center of the gorge toward the entrance. But there was more! A kite car was drawn up to the side. The windscreen had been removed, and mounted on the hood was a large bullet-like contrivance that looked not unlike a search lamp. A blinding shaft of bluish radiance spewed from its open end. Playing it back and forth upon the marching men were Jimmy Baker and Xartal, the Martian. "Ultra violet," Grannie Annie explained. "The opposite end of the vibratory scale and the only thing that will combat the infra-red rays that cause red spot fever. Those men won't stop walking until they've reached Shaft Four." Grannie Annie told her story during the long ride back to Shaft Four. We drove slowly, keeping the line of marching Larynx miners always ahead of us. Jimmy Baker had struck a new big lode of Acoustix, a lode which if worked successfully would see Larynx Incorporated become a far more powerful exporting concern than Interstellar Voice . Antlers Park didn't want that. It was he or his agents who placed those lens buttons in the Larynx barracks. For he knew that just as Jupiter's great spot was responsible for a climate and atmosphere suitable for an Earthman on this Eighth Moon, so also was that spot a deadly power in itself, capable when its rays were concentrated of causing a fatal sickness. Then suddenly becoming fearful of Grannie's prying, Antlers Park strove to head her off before she reached Shaft Four. He did head her off and managed to lure her and Baker and Xartal into the Shaft barracks where they would be exposed to the rays from the lens button. But Grannie only pretended to contract the plague. Park then attempted to outwit Ezra Karn and me by returning in Jimmy Baker's kite car with a cockatoo image of Grannie. I listened to all this in silence. "But," I said when she had finished, "how did Park manage to have that image created and why did the mine laborers walk out into the Baldric when they contracted the fever?" Grannie Annie frowned. "I'm not sure I can answer the first of those questions," she replied. "You must remember Antlers Park has been on this moon five years and during that time he must have acquainted himself with many of its secrets. Probably he learned long ago just what to do to make a cockatoo create a mental image. "As for the men going out into the Baldric, that was more of Park's diabolical work. In the walls of the barracks besides those lens buttons were also miniature electro-hypnotic plates, with the master controlling unit located in that valley. Park knew that when the miners were in a drugged condition from the effects of the fever they would be susceptible to the machine's lure.... And now, Billy-boy, are you coming with me?" "Coming with you?" I repeated. "Where?" The old lady lit a cigarette. "Pluto maybe," she said. "There's a penal colony there, you know, and that ought to tie in nicely with a new crime story. I can see it now ... prison break, stolen rocket ship, fugitives lurking in the interplanetary lanes...." "Grannie," I laughed. "You're incorrigible!"

What is Red Spot Fever?

3

Red Spot Fever makes the people who catch it start to talk a lot, and after rambling for a while the people wander into the Baldric as long as they can do so unnoticed. When someone is watching them to try to see where they are going, they stop until they can slip away. This is a big issue for the mining companies that rely on their workers for survival. The Fever comes about by the infra-red rays from Jupiter's great spot, and exposure to these rays over time causes the Fever in humans. The good news is that the infra-red rays can be combated with ultra violet light, which we see Jimmy Baker and Xartal use at the end of the story, shining the light on the miners to counteract the exposure.

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Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net DOUBLE TROUBLE by CARL JACOBI Grannie Annie, that waspish science-fiction writer, was in a jam again. What with red-spot fever, talking cockatoos and flagpole trees, I was running in circles—especially since Grannie became twins every now and then. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] We had left the offices of Interstellar Voice three days ago, Earth time, and now as the immense disc of Jupiter flamed across the sky, entered the outer limits of the Baldric. Grannie Annie strode in the lead, her absurd long-skirted black dress looking as out of place in this desert as the trees. Flagpole trees. They rose straight up like enormous cat-tails, with only a melon-shaped protuberance at the top to show they were a form of vegetation. Everything else was blanketed by the sand and the powerful wind that blew from all quarters. As we reached the first of those trees, Grannie came to a halt. "This is the Baldric all right. If my calculations are right, we've hit it at its narrowest spot." Ezra Karn took a greasy pipe from his lips and spat. "It looks like the rest of this God-forsaken moon," he said, "'ceptin for them sticks." Xartal, the Martian illustrator, said nothing. He was like that, taciturn, speaking only when spoken to. He could be excused this time, however, for this was only our third day on Jupiter's Eighth Moon, and the country was still strange to us. When Annabella C. Flowers, that renowned writer of science fiction, visiphoned me at Crater City, Mars, to meet her here, I had thought she was crazy. But Miss Flowers, known to her friends as Grannie Annie, had always been mildly crazy. If you haven't read her books, you've missed something. She's the author of Lady of the Green Flames , Lady of the Runaway Planet , Lady of the Crimson Space-Beast , and other works of science fiction. Blood-and-thunder as these books are, however, they have one redeeming feature—authenticity of background. Grannie Annie was the original research digger-upper, and when she laid the setting of a yarn on a star of the sixth magnitude, only a transportation-velocity of less than light could prevent her from visiting her "stage" in person. Therefore when she asked me to meet her at the landing field of Interstellar Voice on Jupiter's Eighth Moon, I knew she had another novel in the state of embryo. What I didn't expect was Ezra Karn. He was an old prospector Grannie had met, and he had become so attached to the authoress he now followed her wherever she went. As for Xartal, he was a Martian and was slated to do the illustrations for Grannie's new book. Five minutes after my ship had blasted down, the four of us met in the offices of Interstellar Voice . And then I was shaking hands with Antlers Park, the manager of I. V. himself. "Glad to meet you," he said cordially. "I've just been trying to persuade Miss Flowers not to attempt a trip into the Baldric." "What's the Baldric?" I had asked. Antlers Park flicked the ash from his cheroot and shrugged. "Will you believe me, sir," he said, "when I tell you I've been out here on this forsaken moon five years and don't rightly know myself?" I scowled at that; it didn't make sense. "However, as you perhaps know, the only reason for colonial activities here at all is because of the presence of an ore known as Acoustix. It's no use to the people of Earth but of untold value on Mars. I'm not up on the scientific reasons, but it seems that life on the red planet has developed with a supersonic method of vocal communication. The Martian speaks as the Earthman does, but he amplifies his thoughts' transmission by way of wave lengths as high as three million vibrations per second. The trouble is that by the time the average Martian reaches middle age, his ability to produce those vibrations steadily decreases. Then it was found that this ore, Acoustix, revitalized their sounding apparatus, and the rush was on." "What do you mean?" Park leaned back. "The rush to find more of the ore," he explained. "But up until now this moon is the only place where it can be found. "There are two companies here," he continued, " Interstellar Voice and Larynx Incorporated . Chap by the name of Jimmy Baker runs that. However, the point is, between the properties of these two companies stretches a band or belt which has become known as the Baldric. "There are two principal forms of life in the Baldric; flagpole trees and a species of ornithoid resembling cockatoos. So far no one has crossed the Baldric without trouble." "What sort of trouble?" Grannie Annie had demanded. And when Antlers Park stuttered evasively, the old lady snorted, "Fiddlesticks, I never saw trouble yet that couldn't be explained. We leave in an hour." So now here we were at the outer reaches of the Baldric, four travelers on foot with only the barest necessities in the way of equipment and supplies. I walked forward to get a closer view of one of the flagpole trees. And then abruptly I saw something else. A queer-looking bird squatted there in the sand, looking up at me. Silver in plumage, it resembled a parrot with a crest; and yet it didn't. In some strange way the thing was a hideous caricature. "Look what I found," I yelled. "What I found," said the cockatoo in a very human voice. "Thunder, it talks," I said amazed. "Talks," repeated the bird, blinking its eyes. The cockatoo repeated my last statement again, then rose on its short legs, flapped its wings once and soared off into the sky. Xartal, the Martian illustrator, already had a notebook in his hands and was sketching a likeness of the creature. Ten minutes later we were on the move again. We saw more silver cockatoos and more flagpole trees. Above us, the great disc of Jupiter began to descend toward the horizon. And then all at once Grannie stopped again, this time at the top of a high ridge. She shielded her eyes and stared off into the plain we had just crossed. "Billy-boy," she said to me in a strange voice, "look down there and tell me what you see." I followed the direction of her hand and a shock went through me from head to foot. Down there, slowly toiling across the sand, advanced a party of four persons. In the lead was a little old lady in a black dress. Behind her strode a grizzled Earth man in a flop-brimmed hat, another Earth man, and a Martian. Detail for detail they were a duplicate of ourselves! "A mirage!" said Ezra Karn. But it wasn't a mirage. As the party came closer, we could see that their lips were moving, and their voices became audible. I listened in awe. The duplicate of myself was talking to the duplicate of Grannie Annie, and she was replying in the most natural way. Steadily the four travelers approached. Then, when a dozen yards away, they suddenly faded like a negative exposed to light and disappeared. "What do you make of it?" I said in a hushed voice. Grannie shook her head. "Might be a form of mass hypnosis superinduced by some chemical radiations," she replied. "Whatever it is, we'd better watch our step. There's no telling what might lie ahead." We walked after that with taut nerves and watchful eyes, but we saw no repetition of the "mirage." The wind continued to blow ceaselessly, and the sand seemed to grow more and more powdery. For some time I had fixed my gaze on a dot in the sky which I supposed to be a high-flying cockatoo. As that dot continued to move across the heavens in a single direction, I called Grannie's attention to it. "It's a kite," she nodded. "There should be a car attached to it somewhere." She offered no further explanation, but a quarter of an hour later as we topped another rise a curious elliptical car with a long slanting windscreen came into view. Attached to its hood was a taut wire which slanted up into the sky to connect with the kite. A man was driving and when he saw us, he waved. Five minutes later Grannie was shaking his hand vigorously and mumbling introductions. "This is Jimmy Baker," she said. "He manages Larynx Incorporated , and he's the real reason we're here." I decided I liked Baker the moment I saw him. In his middle thirties, he was tall and lean, with pleasant blue eyes which even his sand goggles could not conceal. "I can't tell you how glad I am you're here, Grannie," he said. "If anybody can help me, you can." Grannie's eyes glittered. "Trouble with the mine laborers?" she questioned. Jimmy Baker nodded. He told his story over the roar of the wind as we headed back across the desert. Occasionally he touched a stud on an electric windlass to which the kite wire was attached. Apparently these adjustments moved planes or fins on the kite and accounted for the car's ability to move in any direction. "If I weren't a realist, I'd say that Larynx Incorporated has been bewitched," he began slowly. "We pay our men high wages and give them excellent living conditions with a vacation on Callisto every year. Up until a short time ago most of them were in excellent health and spirits. Then the Red Spot Fever got them." "Red Spot Fever?" Grannie looked at him curiously. Jimmy Baker nodded. "The first symptoms are a tendency to garrulousness on the part of the patient. Then they disappear." He paused to make an adjustment of the windlass. "They walk out into the Baldric," he continued, "and nothing can stop them. We tried following them, of course, but it was no go. As soon as they realize they're being followed, they stop. But the moment our eyes are turned, they give us the slip." "But surely you must have some idea of where they go," Grannie said. Baker lit a cigarette. "There's all kinds of rumors," he replied, "but none of them will hold water. By the way, there's a cockatoo eyrie ahead of us." I followed his gaze and saw a curious structure suspended between a rude circle of flagpole trees. A strange web-like formation of translucent gauzy material, it was. Fully two hundred cockatoos were perched upon it. They watched us with their mild eyes as we passed, but they didn't move. After that we were rolling up the driveway that led to the offices of Larynx Incorporated . As Jimmy Baker led the way up the inclined ramp, a door in the central building opened, and a man emerged. His face was drawn. "Mr. Baker," he said breathlessly, "seventy-five workers at Shaft Four have headed out into the Baldric." Baker dropped his cigarette and ground his heel on it savagely. "Shaft Four, eh?" he repeated. "That's our principal mine. If the fever spreads there, I'm licked." He motioned us into his office and strode across to a desk. Silent Xartal, the Martian illustrator, took a chair in a corner and got his notebook out, sketching the room's interior. Grannie Annie remained standing. Presently the old lady walked across to the desk and helped herself to the bottle of Martian whiskey there. "There must be ways of stopping this," she said. "Have you called in any physicians? Why don't you call an enforced vacation and send the men away until the plague has died down?" Baker shook his head. "Three doctors from Callisto were here last month. They were as much at loss as I am. As for sending the men away, I may have to do that, but when I do, it means quits. Our company is chartered with Spacolonial, and you know what that means. Failure to produce during a period of thirty days or more, and you lose all rights." A visiphone bell sounded, and Baker walked across to the instrument. A man's face formed in the vision plate. Baker listened, said "Okay" and threw off the switch. "The entire crew of Shaft Four have gone out into the Baldric," he said slowly. There was a large map hanging on the wall back of Baker's desk. Grannie Annie walked across to it and began to study its markings. "Shaft Four is at the outer edge of the Baldric at a point where that corridor is at its widest," she said. Baker looked up. "That's right. We only began operations there a comparatively short time ago. Struck a rich vein of Acoustix that runs deep in. If that vein holds out, we'll double the output of Interstellar Voice , our rival, in a year." Grannie nodded. "I think you and I and Xartal had better take a run up there," she said. "But first I want to see your laboratory." There was no refusing her. Jimmy Baker led the way down to a lower level where a huge laboratory and experimental shop ran the length of the building. Grannie seized a light weight carry-case and began dropping articles into it. A pontocated glass lens, three or four Wellington radite bulbs, each with a spectroscopic filament, a small dynamo that would operate on a kite windlass, and a quantity of wire and other items. The kite car was brought out again, and the old woman, Baker and the Martian took their places in it. Then Jimmy waved, and the car began to roll down the ramp. Not until they had vanished in the desert haze did I sense the loneliness of this outpost. With that loneliness came a sudden sense of foreboding. Had I been a fool to let Grannie go? I thought of her, an old woman who should be in a rocking chair, knitting socks. If anything happened to Annabella C. Flowers, I would never forgive myself and neither would her millions of readers. Ezra Karn and I went back into the office. The old prospector chuckled. "Dang human dynamo. Got more energy than a runaway comet." A connecting door on the far side of the office opened onto a long corridor which ended at a staircase. "Let's look around," I said. We passed down the corridor and climbed the staircase to the second floor. Here were the general offices of Larynx Incorporated , and through glass doors I could see clerks busy with counting machines and report tapes. In another chamber the extremely light Acoustix ore was being packed into big cases and marked for shipment. At the far end a door to a small room stood open. Inside a young man was tilted back in a swivel chair before a complicated instrument panel. "C'mon in," he said, seeing us. "If you want a look at your friends, here they are." He flicked a stud, and the entire wall above the panel underwent a slow change of colors. Those colors whirled kaleidescopically, then coalesced into a three-dimensional scene. It was a scene of a rapidly unfolding desert country as seen from the rear of a kite car. Directly behind the windscreen, backs turned to me, were Jimmy Baker, Grannie, and Xartal. It was as if I were standing directly behind them. "It's Mr. Baker's own invention," the operator said. "An improvement on the visiphone." "Do you mean to say you can follow the movements of that car and its passengers wherever it goes? Can you hear them talk too?" "Sure." The operator turned another dial, and Grannie's falsetto voice entered the room. It stopped abruptly. "The machine uses a lot of power," the operator said, "and as yet we haven't got much." The cloud of anxiety which had wrapped itself about me disappeared somewhat as I viewed this device. At least I could now keep myself posted of Grannie's movements. Karn and I went down to the commissary where we ate our supper. When we returned to Jimmy Baker's office, the visiphone bell was ringing. I went over to it and turned it on, and to my surprise the face of Antlers Park flashed on the screen. "Hello," he said in his friendly way. "I see you arrived all right. Is Miss Flowers there?" "Miss Flowers left with Mr. Baker for Shaft Four," I said. "There's trouble up there. Red spot fever." "Fever, eh?" repeated Park. "That's a shame. Is there anything I can do?" "Tell me," I said, "has your company had any trouble with this plague?" "A little. But up until yesterday the fever's been confined to the other side of the Baldric. We had one partial case, but my chemists gave the chap an antitoxin that seems to have worked. Come to think of it, I might drive over to Shaft Four and give Jimmy Baker the formula. I haven't been out in the Baldric for years, but if you didn't have any trouble, I shouldn't either." We exchanged a few more pleasantries, and then he rang off. In exactly an hour I went upstairs to the visiscreen room. Then once more I was directly behind my friends, listening in on their conversation. The view through the windscreen showed an irregular array of flagpole trees, with the sky dotted by high-flying cockatoos. "There's an eyrie over there," Jimmy Baker was saying. "We might as well camp beside it." Moments later a rude circle of flagpole trees loomed ahead. Across the top of them was stretched a translucent web. Jimmy and Grannie got out of the car and began making camp. Xartal remained in his seat. He was drawing pictures on large pieces of pasteboard, and as I stood there in the visiscreen room, I watched him. There was no doubt about it, the Martian was clever. He would make a few rapid lines on one of the pasteboards, rub it a little to get the proper shading and then go on to the next. In swift rotation likenesses of Ezra Karn, of myself, of Jimmy Baker, and of Antlers Park took form. Ezra spoke over my shoulder. "He's doing scenes for Grannie's new book," he said. "The old lady figures on using the events here for a plot. Look at that damned nosy bird! " A silver cockatoo had alighted on the kite car and was surveying curiously Xartal's work. As each drawing was completed, the bird scanned it with rapt attention. Abruptly it flew to the top of the eyrie, where it seemed to be having a consultation with its bird companions. And then abruptly it happened. The cockatoos took off in mass flight. A group of Earth people suddenly materialized on the eyrie, talking and moving about as if it were the most natural thing in the world. With a shock I saw the likeness of myself; I saw Ezra Karn; and I saw the image of Jimmy Baker. The real Jimmy Baker stood next to Grannie, staring up at this incredible mirage. Grannie let out a whoop. "I've got it!" she said. "Those things we see up there are nothing more than mental images. They're Xartal's drawings!" "Don't you see," the lady continued. "Everything that Xartal put on paper has been seen by one or more of these cockatoos. The cockatoos are like Earth parrots all right, but not only have they the power of copying speech, they also have the ability to recreate a mental image of what they have seen. In other words their brains form a powerful photographic impression of the object. That impression is then transmitted simultaneously in telepathic wavelengths to common foci. That eyrie might be likened to a cinema screen, receiving brain vibrations from a hundred different sources that blend into the light field to form what are apparently three-dimensional images." The Larynx manager nodded slowly. "I see," he said. "But why don't the birds reconstruct images from the actual person. Why use drawings?" "Probably because the drawings are exaggerated in certain details and made a greater impression on their brains," Grannie replied. Up on the eyrie a strange performance was taking place. The duplicate of Grannie Annie was bowing to the duplicate of Jimmy Baker, and the image of Ezra Karn was playing leap frog with the image of Antlers Park. Then abruptly the screen before me blurred and went blank. "Sorry," the operator said. "I've used too much power already. Have to give the generators a chance to build it up again." Nodding, I turned and motioned to Karn. We went back downstairs. "That explains something at any rate," the old prospector said. "But how about that Red spot fever?" On Jimmy Baker's desk was a large file marked: FEVER VICTIMS. I opened it and found it contained the case histories of those men who had been attacked by the strange malady. Reading them over, I was struck by one detail. Each patient had received the first symptoms, not while working in the mines, but while sleeping or lounging in the barracks. Five minutes later Karn and I were striding down a white ramp that led to the nearest barracks. The building came into sight, a low rectangular structure, dome-roofed to withstand the violent winds. Inside double tiers of bunks stretched along either wall. In those bunks some thirty men lay sleeping. The far wall was taken up by a huge window of denvo-quartz. As I stood there, something suddenly caught Ezra Karn's eye. He began to walk toward that window. "Look here," he said. Six feet up on that window a small almost imperceptible button of dull metal had been wedged into an aperture cut in the quartz. The central part of the button appeared to be a powerful lens of some kind, and as I seized it and pulled it loose, I felt the hum of tiny clock work. All at once I had it! Red spot fever. Heat fever from the infra-red rays of Jupiter's great spot. Someone had constructed this lens to concentrate and amplify the power of those rays. The internal clockwork served a double purpose. It opened a shutter, and it rotated the lens slowly so that it played for a time on each of the sleeping men. I slid the metal button in my pocket and left the barracks at a run. Back in the visiscreen room, I snapped to the operator: "Turn it on!" The kite car swam into view in the screen above the instrument panel. I stared with open eyes. Jimmy Baker no longer was in the car, nor was Xartal, the Martian. Grannie Annie was there, but seated at the controls was Antlers Park, the manager of Interstellar Voice. Ezra Karn jabbed my elbow. "Grannie's coming back. I thought she'd be getting sick of this blamed moon." It didn't make sense. In all the years I'd known Annabella C. Flowers, never yet had I seen her desert a case until she had woven the clues and facts to a logical conclusion. "Ezra," I said, "we're going to drive out and meet them. There's something screwy here." Ten minutes later in another kite car we were driving at a fast clip through the powdery sands of the Baldric. And before long we saw another car approaching. It was Grannie. As the car drew up alongside I saw her sitting in her prim way next to Antlers Park. Park said: "We left the others at the mine. Miss Flowers is going back with me to my offices to help me improve the formula for that new antitoxin." He waved his hand, and the car moved off. I watched it as it sped across the desert, and a growing suspicion began to form in my mind. Then, like a knife thrust, the truth struck me. "Ezra!" I yelled, swinging the car. "That wasn't Grannie! That was one of those damned cockatoo images. We've got to catch him." The other car was some distance ahead now. Park looked back and saw us following. He did something to the kite wire, and his car leaped ahead. I threw the speed indicator hard over. Our kite was a huge box affair with a steady powerful pull to the connecting wire. Park's vehicle was drawn by a flat triangular kite that dove and fluttered with each variance of the wind. Steadily we began to close in. The manager of Interstellar Voice turned again, and something glinted in his hand. There was a flash of purple flame, and a round hole appeared in our windscreen inches above Karn's head. "Heat gun!" Ezra yelled. Now we were rocketing over the sand dunes, winding in and out between the flagpole trees. I had to catch that car I told myself. Grannie Annie's very life might be at stake, not to mention the lives of hundreds of mine workers. Again Park took aim and again a hole shattered our windscreen. The wind shifted and blew from another quarter. The box kite soared, but the triangular kite faltered. Taking advantage of Park's loss of speed, I raced alongside. The I. V. manager lifted his weapon frantically. But before he could use it a third time, Ezra Karn had whipped a lariat from his belt and sent it coiling across the intervening space. The thong yanked tight about the manager's throat. Park did the only thing he could do. He shut off power, and the two cars coasted to a halt. Then I was across in the other seat, wrenching the weapon free from his grasp. "What have you done with Miss Flowers?" I demanded. The manager's eyes glittered with fear as he saw my finger tense on the trigger. Weakly he lifted an arm and pointed to the northwest. "Val-ley. Thir-ty miles. Entrance hidden by wall of ... flagpole trees." I leaped into the driver's seat and gave the kite its head. And now the country began to undergo a subtle change. The trees seemed to group themselves in a long flanking corridor in a northwesterly direction, as if to hide some secret that lay beyond. Twice I attempted to penetrate that wall, only to find my way blocked by those curious growths. Then a corridor opened before me; a mile forward and the desert began again. But it was a new desert this time: the sand packed hard as granite, the way ahead utterly devoid of vegetation. In the distance black bulging hills extended to right and left, with a narrow chasm or doorway between. I headed for that entrance, and when I reached it, I shut off power with an exclamation of astonishment. There was a huge chair-shaped rock there, and seated upon it was Grannie Annie. She had a tablet in her hands, and she was writing. "Grannie!" I yelled. "What're you doing here? Where's Mr. Baker?" She rose to her feet and clambered down the rock. "Getting back Jimmy's mine laborers," she said, a twinkle in her eyes. "I see you've got Antlers Park. I'm glad of that. It saves me a lot of trouble." She took off her spectacles and wiped them on her sleeve. "Don't look so fuddled, Billy-boy. Come along, and I'll show you." She led the way through the narrow passage into the valley. A deep gorge, it was, with the black sheer cliffs on either side pressing close. Ten feet forward, I stopped short, staring in amazement. Advancing toward me like a column of infantry came a long line of Larynx miners. They walked slowly, looking straight ahead, moving down the center of the gorge toward the entrance. But there was more! A kite car was drawn up to the side. The windscreen had been removed, and mounted on the hood was a large bullet-like contrivance that looked not unlike a search lamp. A blinding shaft of bluish radiance spewed from its open end. Playing it back and forth upon the marching men were Jimmy Baker and Xartal, the Martian. "Ultra violet," Grannie Annie explained. "The opposite end of the vibratory scale and the only thing that will combat the infra-red rays that cause red spot fever. Those men won't stop walking until they've reached Shaft Four." Grannie Annie told her story during the long ride back to Shaft Four. We drove slowly, keeping the line of marching Larynx miners always ahead of us. Jimmy Baker had struck a new big lode of Acoustix, a lode which if worked successfully would see Larynx Incorporated become a far more powerful exporting concern than Interstellar Voice . Antlers Park didn't want that. It was he or his agents who placed those lens buttons in the Larynx barracks. For he knew that just as Jupiter's great spot was responsible for a climate and atmosphere suitable for an Earthman on this Eighth Moon, so also was that spot a deadly power in itself, capable when its rays were concentrated of causing a fatal sickness. Then suddenly becoming fearful of Grannie's prying, Antlers Park strove to head her off before she reached Shaft Four. He did head her off and managed to lure her and Baker and Xartal into the Shaft barracks where they would be exposed to the rays from the lens button. But Grannie only pretended to contract the plague. Park then attempted to outwit Ezra Karn and me by returning in Jimmy Baker's kite car with a cockatoo image of Grannie. I listened to all this in silence. "But," I said when she had finished, "how did Park manage to have that image created and why did the mine laborers walk out into the Baldric when they contracted the fever?" Grannie Annie frowned. "I'm not sure I can answer the first of those questions," she replied. "You must remember Antlers Park has been on this moon five years and during that time he must have acquainted himself with many of its secrets. Probably he learned long ago just what to do to make a cockatoo create a mental image. "As for the men going out into the Baldric, that was more of Park's diabolical work. In the walls of the barracks besides those lens buttons were also miniature electro-hypnotic plates, with the master controlling unit located in that valley. Park knew that when the miners were in a drugged condition from the effects of the fever they would be susceptible to the machine's lure.... And now, Billy-boy, are you coming with me?" "Coming with you?" I repeated. "Where?" The old lady lit a cigarette. "Pluto maybe," she said. "There's a penal colony there, you know, and that ought to tie in nicely with a new crime story. I can see it now ... prison break, stolen rocket ship, fugitives lurking in the interplanetary lanes...." "Grannie," I laughed. "You're incorrigible!"

What is Red Spot Fever?

8

Jimmy Baker believes he is losing his workers to onset Red Spot Fever, the symptoms of which include extreme talkativeness followed by a tendency to wander away and disappear. Following the discovery of the massive store of Acoustix around Shaft Four, his workers began wandering into the vastness of the Baldric. Billy and Ezra confirm Jimmy's suspicions when they discover a device hidden in the barracks at Larynx Incorporated that concentrates and amplifies the power of the infra-red rays from nearby Jupiter's great spot. The device operates on a timer so that it beams onto the workers as they sleep. Antlers Park admits to having installed the device because he feared the resultant competition from Jimmy Baker's discovery of the deep Acoustix vein. In order to combat the Red Spot Fever, Annie and Jimmy concoct a plan to utilize Jimmy's kite car as a makeshift beam from which to cast ultraviolet rays upon the wandering workers. Since the rays are at the opposite end of the vibratory scale, they can be used to subvert the symptoms of Red Spot Fever and draw the workers back to Larynx Incorporated.

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Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net DOUBLE TROUBLE by CARL JACOBI Grannie Annie, that waspish science-fiction writer, was in a jam again. What with red-spot fever, talking cockatoos and flagpole trees, I was running in circles—especially since Grannie became twins every now and then. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] We had left the offices of Interstellar Voice three days ago, Earth time, and now as the immense disc of Jupiter flamed across the sky, entered the outer limits of the Baldric. Grannie Annie strode in the lead, her absurd long-skirted black dress looking as out of place in this desert as the trees. Flagpole trees. They rose straight up like enormous cat-tails, with only a melon-shaped protuberance at the top to show they were a form of vegetation. Everything else was blanketed by the sand and the powerful wind that blew from all quarters. As we reached the first of those trees, Grannie came to a halt. "This is the Baldric all right. If my calculations are right, we've hit it at its narrowest spot." Ezra Karn took a greasy pipe from his lips and spat. "It looks like the rest of this God-forsaken moon," he said, "'ceptin for them sticks." Xartal, the Martian illustrator, said nothing. He was like that, taciturn, speaking only when spoken to. He could be excused this time, however, for this was only our third day on Jupiter's Eighth Moon, and the country was still strange to us. When Annabella C. Flowers, that renowned writer of science fiction, visiphoned me at Crater City, Mars, to meet her here, I had thought she was crazy. But Miss Flowers, known to her friends as Grannie Annie, had always been mildly crazy. If you haven't read her books, you've missed something. She's the author of Lady of the Green Flames , Lady of the Runaway Planet , Lady of the Crimson Space-Beast , and other works of science fiction. Blood-and-thunder as these books are, however, they have one redeeming feature—authenticity of background. Grannie Annie was the original research digger-upper, and when she laid the setting of a yarn on a star of the sixth magnitude, only a transportation-velocity of less than light could prevent her from visiting her "stage" in person. Therefore when she asked me to meet her at the landing field of Interstellar Voice on Jupiter's Eighth Moon, I knew she had another novel in the state of embryo. What I didn't expect was Ezra Karn. He was an old prospector Grannie had met, and he had become so attached to the authoress he now followed her wherever she went. As for Xartal, he was a Martian and was slated to do the illustrations for Grannie's new book. Five minutes after my ship had blasted down, the four of us met in the offices of Interstellar Voice . And then I was shaking hands with Antlers Park, the manager of I. V. himself. "Glad to meet you," he said cordially. "I've just been trying to persuade Miss Flowers not to attempt a trip into the Baldric." "What's the Baldric?" I had asked. Antlers Park flicked the ash from his cheroot and shrugged. "Will you believe me, sir," he said, "when I tell you I've been out here on this forsaken moon five years and don't rightly know myself?" I scowled at that; it didn't make sense. "However, as you perhaps know, the only reason for colonial activities here at all is because of the presence of an ore known as Acoustix. It's no use to the people of Earth but of untold value on Mars. I'm not up on the scientific reasons, but it seems that life on the red planet has developed with a supersonic method of vocal communication. The Martian speaks as the Earthman does, but he amplifies his thoughts' transmission by way of wave lengths as high as three million vibrations per second. The trouble is that by the time the average Martian reaches middle age, his ability to produce those vibrations steadily decreases. Then it was found that this ore, Acoustix, revitalized their sounding apparatus, and the rush was on." "What do you mean?" Park leaned back. "The rush to find more of the ore," he explained. "But up until now this moon is the only place where it can be found. "There are two companies here," he continued, " Interstellar Voice and Larynx Incorporated . Chap by the name of Jimmy Baker runs that. However, the point is, between the properties of these two companies stretches a band or belt which has become known as the Baldric. "There are two principal forms of life in the Baldric; flagpole trees and a species of ornithoid resembling cockatoos. So far no one has crossed the Baldric without trouble." "What sort of trouble?" Grannie Annie had demanded. And when Antlers Park stuttered evasively, the old lady snorted, "Fiddlesticks, I never saw trouble yet that couldn't be explained. We leave in an hour." So now here we were at the outer reaches of the Baldric, four travelers on foot with only the barest necessities in the way of equipment and supplies. I walked forward to get a closer view of one of the flagpole trees. And then abruptly I saw something else. A queer-looking bird squatted there in the sand, looking up at me. Silver in plumage, it resembled a parrot with a crest; and yet it didn't. In some strange way the thing was a hideous caricature. "Look what I found," I yelled. "What I found," said the cockatoo in a very human voice. "Thunder, it talks," I said amazed. "Talks," repeated the bird, blinking its eyes. The cockatoo repeated my last statement again, then rose on its short legs, flapped its wings once and soared off into the sky. Xartal, the Martian illustrator, already had a notebook in his hands and was sketching a likeness of the creature. Ten minutes later we were on the move again. We saw more silver cockatoos and more flagpole trees. Above us, the great disc of Jupiter began to descend toward the horizon. And then all at once Grannie stopped again, this time at the top of a high ridge. She shielded her eyes and stared off into the plain we had just crossed. "Billy-boy," she said to me in a strange voice, "look down there and tell me what you see." I followed the direction of her hand and a shock went through me from head to foot. Down there, slowly toiling across the sand, advanced a party of four persons. In the lead was a little old lady in a black dress. Behind her strode a grizzled Earth man in a flop-brimmed hat, another Earth man, and a Martian. Detail for detail they were a duplicate of ourselves! "A mirage!" said Ezra Karn. But it wasn't a mirage. As the party came closer, we could see that their lips were moving, and their voices became audible. I listened in awe. The duplicate of myself was talking to the duplicate of Grannie Annie, and she was replying in the most natural way. Steadily the four travelers approached. Then, when a dozen yards away, they suddenly faded like a negative exposed to light and disappeared. "What do you make of it?" I said in a hushed voice. Grannie shook her head. "Might be a form of mass hypnosis superinduced by some chemical radiations," she replied. "Whatever it is, we'd better watch our step. There's no telling what might lie ahead." We walked after that with taut nerves and watchful eyes, but we saw no repetition of the "mirage." The wind continued to blow ceaselessly, and the sand seemed to grow more and more powdery. For some time I had fixed my gaze on a dot in the sky which I supposed to be a high-flying cockatoo. As that dot continued to move across the heavens in a single direction, I called Grannie's attention to it. "It's a kite," she nodded. "There should be a car attached to it somewhere." She offered no further explanation, but a quarter of an hour later as we topped another rise a curious elliptical car with a long slanting windscreen came into view. Attached to its hood was a taut wire which slanted up into the sky to connect with the kite. A man was driving and when he saw us, he waved. Five minutes later Grannie was shaking his hand vigorously and mumbling introductions. "This is Jimmy Baker," she said. "He manages Larynx Incorporated , and he's the real reason we're here." I decided I liked Baker the moment I saw him. In his middle thirties, he was tall and lean, with pleasant blue eyes which even his sand goggles could not conceal. "I can't tell you how glad I am you're here, Grannie," he said. "If anybody can help me, you can." Grannie's eyes glittered. "Trouble with the mine laborers?" she questioned. Jimmy Baker nodded. He told his story over the roar of the wind as we headed back across the desert. Occasionally he touched a stud on an electric windlass to which the kite wire was attached. Apparently these adjustments moved planes or fins on the kite and accounted for the car's ability to move in any direction. "If I weren't a realist, I'd say that Larynx Incorporated has been bewitched," he began slowly. "We pay our men high wages and give them excellent living conditions with a vacation on Callisto every year. Up until a short time ago most of them were in excellent health and spirits. Then the Red Spot Fever got them." "Red Spot Fever?" Grannie looked at him curiously. Jimmy Baker nodded. "The first symptoms are a tendency to garrulousness on the part of the patient. Then they disappear." He paused to make an adjustment of the windlass. "They walk out into the Baldric," he continued, "and nothing can stop them. We tried following them, of course, but it was no go. As soon as they realize they're being followed, they stop. But the moment our eyes are turned, they give us the slip." "But surely you must have some idea of where they go," Grannie said. Baker lit a cigarette. "There's all kinds of rumors," he replied, "but none of them will hold water. By the way, there's a cockatoo eyrie ahead of us." I followed his gaze and saw a curious structure suspended between a rude circle of flagpole trees. A strange web-like formation of translucent gauzy material, it was. Fully two hundred cockatoos were perched upon it. They watched us with their mild eyes as we passed, but they didn't move. After that we were rolling up the driveway that led to the offices of Larynx Incorporated . As Jimmy Baker led the way up the inclined ramp, a door in the central building opened, and a man emerged. His face was drawn. "Mr. Baker," he said breathlessly, "seventy-five workers at Shaft Four have headed out into the Baldric." Baker dropped his cigarette and ground his heel on it savagely. "Shaft Four, eh?" he repeated. "That's our principal mine. If the fever spreads there, I'm licked." He motioned us into his office and strode across to a desk. Silent Xartal, the Martian illustrator, took a chair in a corner and got his notebook out, sketching the room's interior. Grannie Annie remained standing. Presently the old lady walked across to the desk and helped herself to the bottle of Martian whiskey there. "There must be ways of stopping this," she said. "Have you called in any physicians? Why don't you call an enforced vacation and send the men away until the plague has died down?" Baker shook his head. "Three doctors from Callisto were here last month. They were as much at loss as I am. As for sending the men away, I may have to do that, but when I do, it means quits. Our company is chartered with Spacolonial, and you know what that means. Failure to produce during a period of thirty days or more, and you lose all rights." A visiphone bell sounded, and Baker walked across to the instrument. A man's face formed in the vision plate. Baker listened, said "Okay" and threw off the switch. "The entire crew of Shaft Four have gone out into the Baldric," he said slowly. There was a large map hanging on the wall back of Baker's desk. Grannie Annie walked across to it and began to study its markings. "Shaft Four is at the outer edge of the Baldric at a point where that corridor is at its widest," she said. Baker looked up. "That's right. We only began operations there a comparatively short time ago. Struck a rich vein of Acoustix that runs deep in. If that vein holds out, we'll double the output of Interstellar Voice , our rival, in a year." Grannie nodded. "I think you and I and Xartal had better take a run up there," she said. "But first I want to see your laboratory." There was no refusing her. Jimmy Baker led the way down to a lower level where a huge laboratory and experimental shop ran the length of the building. Grannie seized a light weight carry-case and began dropping articles into it. A pontocated glass lens, three or four Wellington radite bulbs, each with a spectroscopic filament, a small dynamo that would operate on a kite windlass, and a quantity of wire and other items. The kite car was brought out again, and the old woman, Baker and the Martian took their places in it. Then Jimmy waved, and the car began to roll down the ramp. Not until they had vanished in the desert haze did I sense the loneliness of this outpost. With that loneliness came a sudden sense of foreboding. Had I been a fool to let Grannie go? I thought of her, an old woman who should be in a rocking chair, knitting socks. If anything happened to Annabella C. Flowers, I would never forgive myself and neither would her millions of readers. Ezra Karn and I went back into the office. The old prospector chuckled. "Dang human dynamo. Got more energy than a runaway comet." A connecting door on the far side of the office opened onto a long corridor which ended at a staircase. "Let's look around," I said. We passed down the corridor and climbed the staircase to the second floor. Here were the general offices of Larynx Incorporated , and through glass doors I could see clerks busy with counting machines and report tapes. In another chamber the extremely light Acoustix ore was being packed into big cases and marked for shipment. At the far end a door to a small room stood open. Inside a young man was tilted back in a swivel chair before a complicated instrument panel. "C'mon in," he said, seeing us. "If you want a look at your friends, here they are." He flicked a stud, and the entire wall above the panel underwent a slow change of colors. Those colors whirled kaleidescopically, then coalesced into a three-dimensional scene. It was a scene of a rapidly unfolding desert country as seen from the rear of a kite car. Directly behind the windscreen, backs turned to me, were Jimmy Baker, Grannie, and Xartal. It was as if I were standing directly behind them. "It's Mr. Baker's own invention," the operator said. "An improvement on the visiphone." "Do you mean to say you can follow the movements of that car and its passengers wherever it goes? Can you hear them talk too?" "Sure." The operator turned another dial, and Grannie's falsetto voice entered the room. It stopped abruptly. "The machine uses a lot of power," the operator said, "and as yet we haven't got much." The cloud of anxiety which had wrapped itself about me disappeared somewhat as I viewed this device. At least I could now keep myself posted of Grannie's movements. Karn and I went down to the commissary where we ate our supper. When we returned to Jimmy Baker's office, the visiphone bell was ringing. I went over to it and turned it on, and to my surprise the face of Antlers Park flashed on the screen. "Hello," he said in his friendly way. "I see you arrived all right. Is Miss Flowers there?" "Miss Flowers left with Mr. Baker for Shaft Four," I said. "There's trouble up there. Red spot fever." "Fever, eh?" repeated Park. "That's a shame. Is there anything I can do?" "Tell me," I said, "has your company had any trouble with this plague?" "A little. But up until yesterday the fever's been confined to the other side of the Baldric. We had one partial case, but my chemists gave the chap an antitoxin that seems to have worked. Come to think of it, I might drive over to Shaft Four and give Jimmy Baker the formula. I haven't been out in the Baldric for years, but if you didn't have any trouble, I shouldn't either." We exchanged a few more pleasantries, and then he rang off. In exactly an hour I went upstairs to the visiscreen room. Then once more I was directly behind my friends, listening in on their conversation. The view through the windscreen showed an irregular array of flagpole trees, with the sky dotted by high-flying cockatoos. "There's an eyrie over there," Jimmy Baker was saying. "We might as well camp beside it." Moments later a rude circle of flagpole trees loomed ahead. Across the top of them was stretched a translucent web. Jimmy and Grannie got out of the car and began making camp. Xartal remained in his seat. He was drawing pictures on large pieces of pasteboard, and as I stood there in the visiscreen room, I watched him. There was no doubt about it, the Martian was clever. He would make a few rapid lines on one of the pasteboards, rub it a little to get the proper shading and then go on to the next. In swift rotation likenesses of Ezra Karn, of myself, of Jimmy Baker, and of Antlers Park took form. Ezra spoke over my shoulder. "He's doing scenes for Grannie's new book," he said. "The old lady figures on using the events here for a plot. Look at that damned nosy bird! " A silver cockatoo had alighted on the kite car and was surveying curiously Xartal's work. As each drawing was completed, the bird scanned it with rapt attention. Abruptly it flew to the top of the eyrie, where it seemed to be having a consultation with its bird companions. And then abruptly it happened. The cockatoos took off in mass flight. A group of Earth people suddenly materialized on the eyrie, talking and moving about as if it were the most natural thing in the world. With a shock I saw the likeness of myself; I saw Ezra Karn; and I saw the image of Jimmy Baker. The real Jimmy Baker stood next to Grannie, staring up at this incredible mirage. Grannie let out a whoop. "I've got it!" she said. "Those things we see up there are nothing more than mental images. They're Xartal's drawings!" "Don't you see," the lady continued. "Everything that Xartal put on paper has been seen by one or more of these cockatoos. The cockatoos are like Earth parrots all right, but not only have they the power of copying speech, they also have the ability to recreate a mental image of what they have seen. In other words their brains form a powerful photographic impression of the object. That impression is then transmitted simultaneously in telepathic wavelengths to common foci. That eyrie might be likened to a cinema screen, receiving brain vibrations from a hundred different sources that blend into the light field to form what are apparently three-dimensional images." The Larynx manager nodded slowly. "I see," he said. "But why don't the birds reconstruct images from the actual person. Why use drawings?" "Probably because the drawings are exaggerated in certain details and made a greater impression on their brains," Grannie replied. Up on the eyrie a strange performance was taking place. The duplicate of Grannie Annie was bowing to the duplicate of Jimmy Baker, and the image of Ezra Karn was playing leap frog with the image of Antlers Park. Then abruptly the screen before me blurred and went blank. "Sorry," the operator said. "I've used too much power already. Have to give the generators a chance to build it up again." Nodding, I turned and motioned to Karn. We went back downstairs. "That explains something at any rate," the old prospector said. "But how about that Red spot fever?" On Jimmy Baker's desk was a large file marked: FEVER VICTIMS. I opened it and found it contained the case histories of those men who had been attacked by the strange malady. Reading them over, I was struck by one detail. Each patient had received the first symptoms, not while working in the mines, but while sleeping or lounging in the barracks. Five minutes later Karn and I were striding down a white ramp that led to the nearest barracks. The building came into sight, a low rectangular structure, dome-roofed to withstand the violent winds. Inside double tiers of bunks stretched along either wall. In those bunks some thirty men lay sleeping. The far wall was taken up by a huge window of denvo-quartz. As I stood there, something suddenly caught Ezra Karn's eye. He began to walk toward that window. "Look here," he said. Six feet up on that window a small almost imperceptible button of dull metal had been wedged into an aperture cut in the quartz. The central part of the button appeared to be a powerful lens of some kind, and as I seized it and pulled it loose, I felt the hum of tiny clock work. All at once I had it! Red spot fever. Heat fever from the infra-red rays of Jupiter's great spot. Someone had constructed this lens to concentrate and amplify the power of those rays. The internal clockwork served a double purpose. It opened a shutter, and it rotated the lens slowly so that it played for a time on each of the sleeping men. I slid the metal button in my pocket and left the barracks at a run. Back in the visiscreen room, I snapped to the operator: "Turn it on!" The kite car swam into view in the screen above the instrument panel. I stared with open eyes. Jimmy Baker no longer was in the car, nor was Xartal, the Martian. Grannie Annie was there, but seated at the controls was Antlers Park, the manager of Interstellar Voice. Ezra Karn jabbed my elbow. "Grannie's coming back. I thought she'd be getting sick of this blamed moon." It didn't make sense. In all the years I'd known Annabella C. Flowers, never yet had I seen her desert a case until she had woven the clues and facts to a logical conclusion. "Ezra," I said, "we're going to drive out and meet them. There's something screwy here." Ten minutes later in another kite car we were driving at a fast clip through the powdery sands of the Baldric. And before long we saw another car approaching. It was Grannie. As the car drew up alongside I saw her sitting in her prim way next to Antlers Park. Park said: "We left the others at the mine. Miss Flowers is going back with me to my offices to help me improve the formula for that new antitoxin." He waved his hand, and the car moved off. I watched it as it sped across the desert, and a growing suspicion began to form in my mind. Then, like a knife thrust, the truth struck me. "Ezra!" I yelled, swinging the car. "That wasn't Grannie! That was one of those damned cockatoo images. We've got to catch him." The other car was some distance ahead now. Park looked back and saw us following. He did something to the kite wire, and his car leaped ahead. I threw the speed indicator hard over. Our kite was a huge box affair with a steady powerful pull to the connecting wire. Park's vehicle was drawn by a flat triangular kite that dove and fluttered with each variance of the wind. Steadily we began to close in. The manager of Interstellar Voice turned again, and something glinted in his hand. There was a flash of purple flame, and a round hole appeared in our windscreen inches above Karn's head. "Heat gun!" Ezra yelled. Now we were rocketing over the sand dunes, winding in and out between the flagpole trees. I had to catch that car I told myself. Grannie Annie's very life might be at stake, not to mention the lives of hundreds of mine workers. Again Park took aim and again a hole shattered our windscreen. The wind shifted and blew from another quarter. The box kite soared, but the triangular kite faltered. Taking advantage of Park's loss of speed, I raced alongside. The I. V. manager lifted his weapon frantically. But before he could use it a third time, Ezra Karn had whipped a lariat from his belt and sent it coiling across the intervening space. The thong yanked tight about the manager's throat. Park did the only thing he could do. He shut off power, and the two cars coasted to a halt. Then I was across in the other seat, wrenching the weapon free from his grasp. "What have you done with Miss Flowers?" I demanded. The manager's eyes glittered with fear as he saw my finger tense on the trigger. Weakly he lifted an arm and pointed to the northwest. "Val-ley. Thir-ty miles. Entrance hidden by wall of ... flagpole trees." I leaped into the driver's seat and gave the kite its head. And now the country began to undergo a subtle change. The trees seemed to group themselves in a long flanking corridor in a northwesterly direction, as if to hide some secret that lay beyond. Twice I attempted to penetrate that wall, only to find my way blocked by those curious growths. Then a corridor opened before me; a mile forward and the desert began again. But it was a new desert this time: the sand packed hard as granite, the way ahead utterly devoid of vegetation. In the distance black bulging hills extended to right and left, with a narrow chasm or doorway between. I headed for that entrance, and when I reached it, I shut off power with an exclamation of astonishment. There was a huge chair-shaped rock there, and seated upon it was Grannie Annie. She had a tablet in her hands, and she was writing. "Grannie!" I yelled. "What're you doing here? Where's Mr. Baker?" She rose to her feet and clambered down the rock. "Getting back Jimmy's mine laborers," she said, a twinkle in her eyes. "I see you've got Antlers Park. I'm glad of that. It saves me a lot of trouble." She took off her spectacles and wiped them on her sleeve. "Don't look so fuddled, Billy-boy. Come along, and I'll show you." She led the way through the narrow passage into the valley. A deep gorge, it was, with the black sheer cliffs on either side pressing close. Ten feet forward, I stopped short, staring in amazement. Advancing toward me like a column of infantry came a long line of Larynx miners. They walked slowly, looking straight ahead, moving down the center of the gorge toward the entrance. But there was more! A kite car was drawn up to the side. The windscreen had been removed, and mounted on the hood was a large bullet-like contrivance that looked not unlike a search lamp. A blinding shaft of bluish radiance spewed from its open end. Playing it back and forth upon the marching men were Jimmy Baker and Xartal, the Martian. "Ultra violet," Grannie Annie explained. "The opposite end of the vibratory scale and the only thing that will combat the infra-red rays that cause red spot fever. Those men won't stop walking until they've reached Shaft Four." Grannie Annie told her story during the long ride back to Shaft Four. We drove slowly, keeping the line of marching Larynx miners always ahead of us. Jimmy Baker had struck a new big lode of Acoustix, a lode which if worked successfully would see Larynx Incorporated become a far more powerful exporting concern than Interstellar Voice . Antlers Park didn't want that. It was he or his agents who placed those lens buttons in the Larynx barracks. For he knew that just as Jupiter's great spot was responsible for a climate and atmosphere suitable for an Earthman on this Eighth Moon, so also was that spot a deadly power in itself, capable when its rays were concentrated of causing a fatal sickness. Then suddenly becoming fearful of Grannie's prying, Antlers Park strove to head her off before she reached Shaft Four. He did head her off and managed to lure her and Baker and Xartal into the Shaft barracks where they would be exposed to the rays from the lens button. But Grannie only pretended to contract the plague. Park then attempted to outwit Ezra Karn and me by returning in Jimmy Baker's kite car with a cockatoo image of Grannie. I listened to all this in silence. "But," I said when she had finished, "how did Park manage to have that image created and why did the mine laborers walk out into the Baldric when they contracted the fever?" Grannie Annie frowned. "I'm not sure I can answer the first of those questions," she replied. "You must remember Antlers Park has been on this moon five years and during that time he must have acquainted himself with many of its secrets. Probably he learned long ago just what to do to make a cockatoo create a mental image. "As for the men going out into the Baldric, that was more of Park's diabolical work. In the walls of the barracks besides those lens buttons were also miniature electro-hypnotic plates, with the master controlling unit located in that valley. Park knew that when the miners were in a drugged condition from the effects of the fever they would be susceptible to the machine's lure.... And now, Billy-boy, are you coming with me?" "Coming with you?" I repeated. "Where?" The old lady lit a cigarette. "Pluto maybe," she said. "There's a penal colony there, you know, and that ought to tie in nicely with a new crime story. I can see it now ... prison break, stolen rocket ship, fugitives lurking in the interplanetary lanes...." "Grannie," I laughed. "You're incorrigible!"

What is Red Spot Fever?

1

Red Spot Fever is an illness that Jimmy Baker's workers come down with after Antlers Park hatches a plan to make them sick. He or one of his minions sneaks into the workers' barracks and places a piece of metal with a lens on the wall. The lens works to amplify Jupiter's infrared-rays, and the rays hit the men while they are sleeping. The workers are affected by this contraption because it makes them extremely talkative and forces them to walk out of their mines. Importantly, Billy looks through Jimmy Baker's folder of victims and makes a connection that the men are becoming sick while they are sleeping, and not while they are working. This gives Ezra and Billy the idea to go to the barracks and look around, and that's when they find the lens that amplifies the harmful rays. Grannie Annie is able to solve the problem by hitting the infected men with ultraviolet light which counteracts against the infrared-rays. When the men are no longer poisoned by the infrared, they walk right back to their work stations.